The Bukharans: A Dynastic, Diplomatic, and Commercial History, 1550-1702 - Burton A.

Author: Burton A.

Tags: ethnography central asia asia history of peoples bukharans

ISBN: 0-312-17387-3

Year: 1997

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Text

The Bukharans
A Dynastic, Diplomatic and
Commercial History
1550-1702

The Bukharans

A Dynastic, Diplomatic and
Commercial History
1550-1702

Audrey Burton

St. Martin’s Press
New York

© 1997 Audrey Burton
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or
reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission
except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles
or reviews. For information, address:
St. Martin’s Press, Scholarly and Reference Division,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010

First published in the United States of America in 1997
Printed in Great Britain
ISBN 0-312-17387-3

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Burton, Audrey
The Bukharans: a dynastic, diplomatic, and commercial history,
1550-1702/Audrey Burton.

p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p.
ISBN 0-312-17387-3

) and index.

(cloth)

1. Khanate of Bukhara-—History. I. Title.
DK948.83.B87 1997
958-dce21

97-12314

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bAAARG-P-SAIGH

To my Mother, Olga Alazrachi, known to all as Dodo.
She sat in my study hour upon hour while I was working on an
earlier draft of this book, giving me moral support, encouragement and unstinting help. Sadly she is no longer with us, but it is
for her sake above all that I persevered and completed the task.

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Contents

Abbreviations
Transliteration scheme

ix
x

Glossary

xii

Abbreviated table of rulers
Preface
Illustrations

XVili
x1x
xxi

Part One: History
Introduction: the khanate of Ma ward’ al-nahr
Detailed map of the khanate, Khurasan and Kashghariya
1 A new capital, Bukhara. 1550-61
2 Iskandar’s reign and the struggle for control. 1561-83
3 Foreign expansion under ‘Abdallah and ‘Abd al-Mu’min. 1583-98
4 Birthpangs of the Ashtarkhanid dynasty. 1598-1605
5 Wali Muhammad’s inglorious reign. 1605-11
6 Imam Quli’s long reign. 1611-41
7 Nadir Muhammad and his problems. 1641-51
8 ‘Abd al-‘Aziz alone at the helm. 1651-81
9 Subhan Quli, the last great Ashtarkhanid. 1681-1705

1
7
8
17
46
99
123
135
212
265
329

Part Two: Trade

10 Merchandise
Maps of trade routes to
a. Iran, Kashghariya and India

363

b. China
c. Muscovy and Siberia
11 Routes
12 The khan’s contribution

13 Trade with Asia
14 Trade with Muscovy
15 Trade with Siberia

391
413
427

460
502

Genealogical tables
Annotated tables of rules

544
556

Bibliography

575

Index

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Abbreviations

BL
BI
CHI
Chteniya

DAI
INA
IRGO
IVAN Uzb.
Khilkov
L.
LOIVAN
Materialy
M.

"Nakaz"
NAA
n.n
ONU
OON
Pamyatniki
PPPKIV
PZTKLA
PSZ
RIB
SGGD
SAGU
SOAS
SON
TsGADA
Vremennik

vyp.
ZDMG
ZhMNP

Akty istoricheskie sobrannye i izdannye Arkheograficheskoyu
kommissieyu
Akademiya nauk.
Bartol'dovskie chteniya.
British Library.
Bibliotheca Indica.

Cambridge History of India.
Chteniya v imperatorskom Obshchestve istorii i drevnostei pri
Moskovskom universitete.
Dopolnenie k Aktam istoricheskam.
Institut narodov Azii AN SSSR, Leningrad.
Imperatorskoe Russkoe geograficheskoe obshchestvo.
Institut vostokovedeniya AN Uzbekskoi SSR.
Sbornik knyazya Khilkov.
Leningrad.
Leningradskoe otdelenie Instituta vostokovedeniya Akademii nauk.
Materialy po istorii Uzbekskoi, Tadzhikskoi i Turkmenskoi SSR.
Moscow.
"Nakaz Borisu i Semenu Pazukhinym..."
Narody Azii i Afriki.
no name given.
Obshchestvennye nauki v Uzbekistane.
Otdelenie obshchestvennykh nauk.

Pamyatniki diplomaticheskikh i torgovykh snoshenii Moskovskoi Rusi s Persiei.
Pis'mennye pamyatniki i problemy kul'tury i iskusstva vostoka.
Protokoly zasedanii i soobshchenii chlenov Turkestankogo
kruzhka lyubitelei arkheologii.
Polnoe sobranie zakonov.
Russkaya istoricheskaya biblioteka.
Sobranie gosudarstvennykh gramot i dogovorov.
Sredneaziatskii Gosudarstvennyi Universitet, Tashkent.

School of Oriental and African Studies, London.
Seriya obshchestvennykh nauk.
Tsentral'nyi gosudarstvennyi arkhiv drevnikh aktov, Moscow.
Vremennik Imperatorskogo Moskovskogo obshchestva istorii i
drevnostei rossiiskikh.
vypusk, i.e. number.
Zeitschrift des Deutschen Morgenlandischen Gesellschaft.
Zhurnal ministerstva narodnogo prosveshcheniya.

Transliteration
Persian

scheme

perce
Sn

ice
dies
ASS.

SOLE=)
:

Wowos

Russian

shch

Glossary '

Abulkhairids

descendants of Aba ’l-Khair Khan, members of the dynasty which
ruled the khanate from 1500 to 1599.

alacha

multi-coloured material made of cotton and hemp called pestred’ in
Muscovy.

Alman

mountain tribes who swelled the ranks of the Bukharan army as
seasonal fighters.

Altan Khan

the Golden Khan, name given to the overall ruler of the eastern
Mongols who lived near Upsa Nor and the Yenisei.

altyn

Muscovite monetary unit equalto 6 den'gi.

amir

commander, leader of a tribe or administrative official who took part

in the khan's Council, led his armies and formed the mainstay of his
power.
ark

name for the citadel of a town in the khanate and also for the fortified
part of the khan's palace.

arshin

Russian measure of length equivalent to 28 inches or 71 cm.

Ashtarkhanid

dynasty which ruled the khanate from 1599 to 1785.

ataliq

adviser to the khan who could take over the government in his
absence; also guardian and mentor of the khan's sons, an ataliq
being appointed for each Prince.

azyam'

male outer garment worn in Muscovy, knee-length and gathered at
the back.

bahadur

a brave, a hero, also a commander and a man who gave military
service to the khan in return for land.

baqawiul

official in charge of the khan's kitchen, who might sit in on his
Council and was often sent abroad as ambassador.

Bi /bik /beg

a title originally reserved for the head of an Uzbeg tribe, but later
used by powerful army leaders or officials.

burmet'

coarse cotton material made in Iran and similar to byaz'

busa

ae boat which carried merchants and ambassadors across the
aspian.

1 Persian unless stated otherwise.
xii

byaz'

see karbas.

charka

Muscovite measure equal to 0.216 pint. According to Golovinsky
there were 10 charki in one kruzhok, but the Slovar' russkogo
yazyka makes it twice that amount.

chihra aqasi

official who supervised the Court pages. He took a major part in the
khan's battles and was also responsible for religious observance in
the cavalry.

Chinghizid

descendant of Genghis Khan.

chit

a sort of chintz called vyboika in Muscovy.

dadkha

official responsible for handing petitions to the khan and delivering
his answer.

dastarkhanchi

official in charge of the khan's table.

den'ga

smallest Muscovite money unit. There were 100 den'gi in 1 poltina
and 200 in 1 rouble.

desyatina

Muscovite measure equal to 2.7 acres.

desyataya

Muscovite tax equal to one in ten, i.e., 20 den'gi per rouble.

diwanbegi

official responsible for overall tax collection in the khanate and for
the correct usage of water in Qarakul.

dvadsataya

Muscovite tax equal to one in 20, i.e., 10 den'gi per rouble.

écu

basic French silver coin worth about 9 tanga in the mid-seventeenth
century.

Farghana

fertile province along the Syr-Darya whose capital was Andijan.

futa

short length of material used as a turban, a shawl or bathrobe

gostinyi dvor

Muscovite traders’ inn-cum-trade-mart, in which foreign and out-oftown merchants were expected to stay and trade under supervision.

gost'
(pl. gosti)

highest ranking and highly privileged Muscovite merchant.

gramota

Muscovite official letter or document.

igta‘/aqta‘

fief granted to a subject in return for service.

ishik agha
bashi

official in charge of security at the khan's palace, also known as
ishik aqasi.

Janibegid

descendants of Jani Bik who ruled the khanate from 1556 to 1599.

karbas

plain cotton material interwoven with linen.

khani

see tanga.
xiii

khaqan/khan

overall ruler of the khanate.

khanqah

a Sufi monastery or hospice, also known as khangah.

khutbah

Friday address in a mosque during which a prayer is offered in the
name of the ruler. A change of name is taken to indicate the
accession of a new ruler.

Kizilbash

see Qizilbash

kopytchatyi

best medicinal rhubarb, much preferred to cherenkovyi or rapontik

in Muscovy and Siberia.

kruzhka

Muscovite measure equal to 2.16 pints. Although there were usually
10 kruzhki in a vedro, there could be no more than three or as many
as twelve.

Kuchkunchid

Abulkhairid Prince of the house of Samarqand.

kuntaidzhi

honorary title of the Qalmaq overall leader.

kupchina

ruler's commercial agent sent to trade abroad on his behalf.

(pl. kupchiny)
lak

a measure equal to 100,000 in seventeenth century India.

lan or liang

Chinese unit of weight and money, which weighed two-thirds of a
rouble and was worth one rouble in 1672 and weighed 1.5 oz.
avoirdupois in 1827.

mann

a unit of weight of which the different variants existing in Bukhara
weighed between 864 gr and 262 kg. Also known as batman.

Ma wara’
al-nahr

the khanate of Bukhara, also known as Transoxiana.

mehmandar

title of the official appointed to look after visiting ambassadors and
monarchs.

mihtar
mukhtar

khanate official who collected and administered both the zakdat (the
obligatory donation to charity), and the funds accruing from the sale
of unclaimed property.

mirab

khanate official in charge of local water distribution.

mir akhur

equerry or head groom. He held the khan's stirrup to help him
mount and dismount, he supervised the khan's horses and he also

commanded detachments of foot soldiers and cavalry.

mithqal

measure of weight generally equal to 4.8 gr.

Miyankal

large island on the Zeravshan river, very near Samargand, between
the rivers Qara-Darya and the Aq-Darya.

X1V

Moghulistan

a country north of Kashghariya which had once stretched from the
Syr-Darya to the Irtysh and from lake Balkhash to the Tien Shan

mountains.
murid

disciple of a Sufi shaikh.

naqib

descendant of the Prophet's nephew ‘Ali who acted as judge in the
Bukharan army. Usually well versed in military science, he played a
vital part in times of war and was highly honoured at Court, being
seated higher than the heir to the throne.

Nauruz

the Persian New Year, which generally coincides with the March
solstice, or more precisely with the moment when the sun enters the
constellation of Aries.

obrok

Muscovite tax in kind and money paid on an individual's trading
premises and turnover.

otvoznaya

Muscovite tax paid on removing goods from a town. Also known as
ot'ezzhaya

parwanchi

official who handed out the khan's orders and administered the Arab

population of the khanate.
pestred'

see alacha.

pir

Sufi shaikh and spiritual director.

pominki

Muscovite term indicating the gifts exchanged by rulers.

posad

urban settlement in Muscovy whose members (posadskie lyudi)
shared a communal burden of taxes (tyaglo) and were expected to

police the streets, fight fires, and provide food and lodging for
ambassadors and soldiers.
pristav

official assigned to foreign ambassadors in Muscovy and Siberia in
order to look after them and prevent them from making contact with
local people.

proezzhaya
gramota

Muscovite transit pass listing the goods carried by a merchant or
ambassador.

proezzhaya
poshlina

Muscovite transit tax calculated on the value of the goods carried.

pud

Muscovite measure of weight equal to 16.38 kg.

ribat

inn under the supervision of Sufi shaikhs primarily intended for
pilgrims.

gadi

Muslim judge and notary.

Qizilbash

‘redhead’, name originally given to the Safavids and their supporters
by the Turks because of their distinctive red headdress. Later used to
indicate Iranians and Shi‘a in general, although strictly speaking it
should have applied only to those of Turkmen origin.

quriltai

council of princes, tribal leaders and high officials consulted by the
khan before taking military and other major decisions.

qush begi

Master of the Hunt and senior army commander, often sent abroad
as ambassador.

Safavids

dynasty which ruled Iran from 1501 to 1732.

sayyid

honorary title given to the descendants of al-Husain, son of the
Prophet's nephew ‘Ali, most of whom were Shi‘a.

Semirech'e

geographical area extending from Kulja, south of lake Balkhash, to
the approaches of the Syr-Darya.

shaikh

superior of a Muslim monastery. Also a man learned in religion and
law, a preacher, or a person in charge of a revered Muslim shrine.

shaikh-al
-Islam

highest religious official in the land, Muslim pontiff, chief mufti and
highest appeal judge.

sikkah

issuing of coins in the name ofa ruler.

shuturwar

camel load.

sluzhilye lyudi

‘serving-men’, Muscovite government officials.

strelets
(pl. strel'tsy)

member of the permanent Muscovite army paid by the state in corn
and money. He fought on foot, wearing a colourful caftan and velvet
cap, and armed with a curved sabre, matchlock musket and hatchet.

strug

Muscovite river boat.

Sufi

member of a Muslim monastic order aiming at spiritual fulfilment
and ecstasy by way of asceticism.

sultan 4
ma ‘nawi

effective ruler of the khanate, as against the sultan suri who was
generally an older man and a mere figurehead.

Suyunchid

Abulkhairid Prince of the house of Tashkent.

taidzhi

Qalmag chief or leader of a tribe. Also known as taisha.

tamga

Muscovite tax paid on sales, purchases and/or imports.

tanab

measure which varied between 1,707 m? and 4,097m2.

tanga

basic Bukharan silver coin worth one-third of a rupee in the early

seventeenth century, a quarter of a rupee from 1646 and about half
an Iranian ‘abbassi.

teziki

general Muscovite term used in the sixteenth and seventeenth century
to denote a merchant from Central Asia or Iran.
group of shops inside a domed building.

timcha

row of shops in a covered alley.

Xvi

Time of
Troubles

period of disorders and civil strife in Muscovy which ended with the
accession of the first Romanov.

tolmach

translator/interpreter.

Transoxiana

see Ma wara’ al-nahr.

tuman

Iranian, unit of currency equal to 50 ‘abbassi, 33 roubles, 15 écus,
and between 125 and 142.9 tanga in the seventeenth century.

tyaglo

the burden of taxation borne by registered inhabitants of a posad, or
posadskie lyudi.

Uzbegs

group of fiercely independent Turco-Mongol tribes who shared a
common origin with the Qazaqs and Noghays but chose to settle in
the khanate and in Khwarazm during the sixteenth century.

vedro

Russian measure of capacity now equal to about 21.6 pints of which
several official sizes existed in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries.

vydel'nyi
khleb

tithe paid on field crops in Siberia.

voevoda
(pl.voevody)

Russian provincial governor.

weighables

Muscovite term for items which had to be weighed before they could
be taxed and which ranged from honey to lead, from raw cotton to
gunpowder.

Yaitsk

name of two small towns on the Yaik/Ural river which later became
known as Gur'ev and Ural'sk.

yavlennaya

Muscovite declaration tax payable on arrival at a Customs post. Also
called yavochnaya and yavchay.

yasak

tribute paid by Siberian tribes to the Tsar in return for his protection.

yasawul

palace servant who acted as usher, messenger and tax-collector. He
also handed to the khan the gifts sent by other rulers and he ensured
that the right amount of booty reached the Treasury after a military
expedition.

Yurgench
yurgenchi

corruption of the words Urganj and Urganji, used in Muscovy when
referring to Khwarazm and its inhabitants.

yurt

a settlement, a country.

zandanichi
zenden'

cotton material produced in the khanate and widely exported.

zapovednye
tovary

prohibited goods not available for sale or purchase on the open
market. They were reserved to the Tsar, who might occasionally
permit an ambassador to acquire some for his master.

zolotnik

Muscovite weight equal to 4.2 gr.
XVii

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Preface

This study was originally inspired by a visit to Central Asia in 1975 when the
writer was deeply impressed, not only by the many historic remains, but also by the
thought that envoys from countries as far apart as Spain and China visited Bukhara
and Samarqand in the days of Tamerlane and Ulugh Beg.
Subsequent reading revealed the importance of the khanate of Bukhara in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a period largely neglected by western historians.
The rulers of the khanate were often regarded with apprehension by their immediate
neighbours, but the European powers did not feel threatened by them, as in the days
of Tamerlane, nor did they feel the need to extend their influence in the area as they
would do in the late nineteenth century, during the period of intensive Russo-British
rivalry known as the ‘Great Game’. However, because of its situation on the Silk
Route and on the trade routes between India and Russia, the khanate played an
important part in international trade, supplying horses to China and India, rhubarb
and lapis lazuli to Iran, cottons to Siberia, valuable lambskins and medicinal herbs to
Muscovy.
In the past western historians have generally painted a picture of a society in
decline because they relied overwhelmingly upon the evidence of Iranian and Mughal
writers who were hostile to the khanate. But a comparison of this evidence with that
of contemporary local writers and unbiased foreign observers has helped to rectify
many of their misconceptions.
For their encouragement in the initial stages of this undertaking, I wish to thank
Professor Malcolm Yapp, Dr. Paul Luft, Professor Dr. Bert G.Fragner, Professor
Edward Allworth and Dr. Shirin Akiner. Before my first visit to the various archives
much valuable advice about research and life in the then Soviet Union was generously
given by J. Brine, Edmund Herzig, Jiirgen Paul, Dr. Devin DeWeese and Dr. John
Barber, Professors R.W. Davies and A. Cross. I should also like to mention the
following Russian specialists, who have been most helpful - E.A.Davidovich,
O.F.Akimushkin, B.Kh.Karmysheva, R.I.Sultanov, Sh.R.Muhammedyarov and
R.G.Mukminova.
I am most grateful to Paul Luft and Shirin Akiner for encouraging me to persevere
in order to have the book published in its entirety despite suggestions that it should be
reduced in size by shedding the bibliography, notes and tables, i.e. those parts which
are of most importance to scholars.
I should like to thank the British Academy for enabling me to visit the Soviet

archives in 1988 and 1991. I am indebted to the members of the Department of
Russian and Modern Slavonic Studies at Leeds, and in particular Professor Michael
Holman and Dr. David Collins, for their encouragement and friendly interest, and to
the University of Leeds for allowing me to make full use of its computer and library
facilities.

xix

Technical problems due to the idiosyncracies of computers and word processors
have been overcome with valuable help from Dr. Donald Spaeth of Glasgow
University, Richard Rowlands, formerly at Reading University and Stanley Ellis,
formerly at the Department of English at Leeds, as well as Mike Eastwood and Bill
Olessky of the University of Leeds. Sasha Barabanov has shown great patience in
attempting to reproduce my trade maps, but without the help and encouragement of
my family I could not have completed the book.
I hope my readers will find that this task has been worthwhile.

Audrey Burton

Green Hammerton
York

late 1 Portrait said to be of ‘Abdallah Khan

Plate 2 Portrait of Iman Quli Khan by Hajji
Muhammed Mus sauwir 1052/1642-3
(by kind permission of Dr. Anatol A. Ivanov)

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Plate 15a General view of the Registan [Samarqand]

ate 15b Tila Kari medresseh built by Yalangtish Bi mid 17th Century [Samargand]

Plate 16a (above) Old and new:
modern Samarqandis by the Shir Dar
medresseh [Samarqand]
(by kind permission of I. Rattee)

Plate 16b (right) Old and new:
having tea by the Lab-i haud [Bukhara]
(by kind permission of E. M. Hyman)

Part One

History

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Introduction

The khanate of Ma wara’ al-nahr

For many people in the west the name of Samarqand is highly evocative. They
associate it with the Silk Route, the spice trade and long, adventurous journeys
through deserts and high mountains. Samarqand might also be known as the capital
of Tamerlane the Great, but Bukhara, to most people, is merely an ancient town
famous for its carpets. They would be surprised to learn that from the 1560s and for
three hundred years Bukhara was the capital of an independent state - the khanate,
later the emirate of Bukhara - situated astride the Silk Route, whose rulers exchanged
embassies with the tsars and the Mughal emperors, and whose merchants dealt with
China, India, Iran, Turkey, Russia and many other nations, east and west.

In 1559 the name of Boghar was of particular interest to the shareholders of the
London-based Muscovy company, for they were perusing the detailed report of one
of their factors, Anthony Jenkinson, sent to investigate the trading potential of the
town. And by 1600 Bukhara and its most outstanding ruler, ‘Abdallah I, were
certainly known to Queen Elizabeth. In that year the ambassador of the ill-fated and
unpopular Tsar, Boris Godunov, told her that the armies of Muscovy had helped Iran
to retake the province of Khurasan from ‘Abdallah of Bukhara.! The reason for such
a misleading piece of information - the Russian armies had not been involved and the
recapture of Khurasan was only attempted after ‘Abdallah's death - can only be
guessed
at. Perhaps it was thought that Boris Godunov's prestige would be increased
if his name was associated with the defeat of a ruler generally feared and respected.
Yet in the days when it was part of the Soviet Union Bukhara seemed to have little
to recommend it to the casual tourist, despite such architectural gems as the ninth
century Samanid tomb, the twelth century Kalan minaret, the seventeenth century
Labi Haud ensemble and the nineteenth century Char Manar. Too many of its
magnificent medressehs and mosques, made of burnt clay and straw, were in a state
of decay, as much because they were not properly finished at the time, as because
they were too numerous to be restored and maintained by the state.? Bukhara
therefore made a poorer first impression than Samargqand, where the fewer
architectural ensembles of note had all been well preserved. Only Bukhara's solid
multi-domed trading structures could give the visitor some idea of the trading
importance of this town in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when it was the

1 Likhachev, 188. Khurasan was a large and fertile province which at one time included Balkh. It
extended westward just beyond Jajarm, northwards beyond Marw and southwards beyond Sabzawar.

2 Meyendorff, 187-8, attributed the tumbled-down look of the town in 1820 either to earthquakes or
to lack of architectural skill.

Bukharans: 1550-1702

capital of an independent country. Nowadays at last it is beginning to flourish again
and its historic importance is again valued and recognised.
In 1550 Bukhara was just one of the towns of the khanate of Ma wara’ al-nahr or
Transoxiana, situated between the Oxus/Amu-Darya and the Syr-Darya, east of the
Caspian Sea. The khanate stretched from Hazarasp on the Oxus, where the small state
of Khwarazm began, to the Tien Shan mountains in the east. A large strip of land on
the right bank of the Syr-Darya, reaching towards the river Chu, included the towns
of Tashkent and Turkestan. There was also some territory south of the Amu-Darya,
now in Afghanistan, which was administered from Balkh, a town revered in the

Islamic world because of its profusion of shrines and its proximity to the alleged tomb
of the fourth Caliph, ‘Ali, at Mazar al-Sharif.
The soil of the khanate was fertile and richly productive, despite the severity of
the climate. The great heat and droughts of its summers contrasted greatly with the
bitterly cold winters, during which a warrior might find his beard covered with hoarfrost, and fast-flowing rivers would freeze, although not usually hard enough to
allow safe passage,? as the armies of the khanate found, more than once, to their cost.
The water of the rivers was skilfully used for irrigation purposes through
innumerable reservoirs (haud) and through two networks of canals, one of which
was situated underground at a depth of two metres, linking wells 7 to 10 metres apart.
The canals were carefully maintained by the authorities. Taxes and maintenance
corvées were extracted for this purpose from the inhabitants. Armies of special
officials (mirab) supervised the daily allocation of water to the peasants (ra‘ya) and

landowners, but such was the importance of regulating the water supply that every
official in the khanate was also connected with water distribution in some capacity or
other.’ Infringement of the water allocation rules was not tolerated. Those found
guilty were punished by losing their water rights.
The irrigation methods used were very successful: enormous varieties of crops,

from grapes and melons to cotton, sugar-cane and rice, were grown all over the
khanate, and within the boundaries of most towns. Fruit and cottons were high on the
list of exports from the khanate, the ‘Ali Kak grapes of Bukhara and the melons of
Bokharz and Zamin being sent, either fresh, dried or as seeds, as far away as India
and China.
From the early sixteenth century the khanate was ruled by the ‘Uzbegs’, a group
of Turkic-speaking nomadic tribes originating in the Qipchaq steppes whose rulers
claimed descent from the Mongol conqueror Genghis Khan through his son Jachi.5
Before he died in 1469 the ancestor of the ruling family, Aba ’1-Khair Khan, carved
an enormous empire which stretched from Tara in the Siberian north to the AmuDarya and from Khwarazm in the west to the Qipchap steppes and Farghana in the
east. But although he married one of Tamerlane's descendants, a Princess from
Samargand, and fought a son of Tamerlane who was based in Herat, he was not
interested in conquering, or settling in, any of the main towns of the area - Bukhara,
Samarqand, Balkh or Herat. He much preferred the nomadic way of life.

3 Khwajah Samandar, 137. Fadlallah b.Ruzbikhan, 86-7, 118-9, 131-2.

4 See further in Burton, Bukharans in trade, 21.
5 See Akhmedoy, Gosudarstvo, 14, for the Qipchaq steppes being known as ‘Uzbeg steppes’ in the
late fourteenth century; Yakubovskii, 3, for the origin of the word ‘Uzbeg’; Semenov A.A., "K
voprosu 0 proiskhozhdenii", for the common origin of Uzbegs, Qazaqs and Noghays.

The khanate of Ma ward’ al-nahr

It was his grandson, Muhammad Shaibani, who brought the Uzbeg tribes to the
khanate and who decided to settle there. Muhammad Shaibani did not share Abi ’1
Khair's love of the nomadic life. Having fled the steppes for safety in his early
childhood and having lived for some years in Bukhara and Astrakhan, he had taken a
liking to the sedentary life. Ambitious and energetic, he decided to emulate Tamerlane
(Timur Lang), who in the early 15th century had ruled a vast empire centred on
Samarqand and stretching from Syria to the Ganges, and he began by ousting
Tamerlane's descendants (the Timurids) from both Ma wara’ al-nahr and Khurasan.
He started by seizing Otrar, as well as Yassi (also known as Turkestan), Bukhara
and Shahr-i sabz in the late 1490s, then in 1500 he took Samarqand from the Timurid
Babur. He went on to conquer the remainder of Transoxiana, starting with Tashkent
in the east, then he ousted the remaining Timurid princes and governors from
Qunduz, Balkh and Khurasan in the south and south-west, and even from Khwarazm
in the north. Unfortunately, his plans for aggrandisement clashed with those of the
Iranian ruler, the Safawid Shah Isma‘il, who was anxious to annex the lands of the
Timurids for himself and who hated Shaibani for his known hostility to the ‘heresy’
of Shi‘ism. Shah Isma‘il marched into Khurasan and managed to trick Shaibani into
leaving the safety of Marw, where he was entrenched, to pursue what he thought was

a retreating army. Shaibani was killed outside Marw in 1510 and in a gesture of
contempt Shah Isma‘il sent his skull, stuffed with hay, to the Ottoman Sultan
Bayazid.® Not content with thus insulting the dead man and his ally, the Shi‘a ruler
then put to the sword Shaibani's supporters and savagely persecuted the Sunnis of
Khurasan. These measures fostered an abiding hatred for the Safawids in the people
of the khanate and their Abulkhairid rulers.
In the years that followed Shaibani's death Khurasan and Khwarazm were taken
by Iran and even Samarqand was briefly lost to Babur in 1512-3.7 But the Timurids
were not able to re-establish themselves in Transoxiana and, after Babur left the area,

in order to found what became the Mughal Empire of India, the Uzbegs remained in
control. Soon their various tribes or clans, said to number 92 or even 100,8 merged
with the local Persian-speaking population, learning their language and the arts of
agriculture and trade, but retaining their interest in cattle-raising and in military
pursuits. Although Persian became the language of literature, Chaghatai Turkish did
not disappear, for the khans, who were bilingual, used it in official letters and poetical
compositions.

The system of government in the khanate was based on the Mongol pattern, but
with a significant difference: the senior member of the Abulkhairid/Shaibanid ruling
family was always chosen as khaqan (overall ruler) or khan, irrespective of his
suitability for the post. During the consecration ceremony he was raised in the air
several times, seated on a piece of white felt held at each corner by Abulkhairids,

tribal leaders, or members of the Muslim religious orders. Next his name was
mentioned in the Friday prayers (khutbah) and engraved on the coins of the khanate
(sikkah), and his reign began. The khaq4n exercised his power from the main town
6 Semenov A.A., ‘Shaibani khan i zavoevanie im imperii Timuridov’, pp. 39-85 in Materialy po
istori tadzhikov as above.
7 Muhammad Haidar Dughlat, text, 116-22, 130-3, 204-26, 232-6.
8 Sultanov, Kochevye plemena, 29-33, 40-44. Chardin, Voyages, II, 121. ‘Yuz-bec, c'est-a-dire
Cent Seigneurs, du grand nombre des Principautés en quoi ce Pais-la est partagé’. Savinov, 49,
says that there were 32 main tribes of Uzbegs, which were subdivided into 92 ethnic groups.

Bukharans: 1550-1702

of the fief or appanage which he had inherited from his father, or which had been
formally allocated to him on the extinction of the relevant branch of the family. This

meant that there was no fixed capital for the khanate, and that by 1556 the khanate had

been ruled from four different centres: Samarqand, Bukhara, Tashkent and Balkh, a
state of affairs conducive to variety, rather than strength in government.
The khan was essentially primus inter pares and not an absolute ruler. He could
not compel obedience to his orders, and could only hope that his relatives, the Princes
(Sultans) would abide by the decisions of the guriltdi/mashwara, the advisory
council in which they took part, together with tribal leaders, high officials and the
amirs, who served as generals in the army or as provincial governors. The quriltai
discussed questions of general interest, and in particular that of war against rebels or
external foes. If war was decided, all were expected to take part in it. The Sultans,
however, tended to be unreliable and wilful, for they were used to ruling their

appanages more or less independently, to the extent of sending abroad their own
ambassadors.? Although they might promise to contribute to the khan's war effort
they would often change their minds, taking their men away in the middle of a
campaign if it dragged on too long, or if it seemed unlikely to end in victory. The
campaign would then have to be wound up for lack of support, as happened in
943/1536-7 when one of the greatest of Muhammad Shaibani's successors, the
warrior khan ‘Ubaidallah, was compelled to abandon the siege of the town of Herat in
Khurasan although he was on the point of success.!° The system was clearly
unsatisfactory. It would have to be changed and this would be done before the end of
the century by ‘Abdallah II.
The Uzbegs being very keen orthodox Muslims (Sunnis), religious dignitaries
played an important role in the administration of the khanate. They ranged from the
qadi, who dispensed justice, to the appeal judge or shaikh al-Islam, not forgetting
the nagib, who had to be one of the Prophet's descendants and an expert in military
science. The main lay officials were the atalig, who acted as tutor for the khaqan's
son and took over the administration in the ruler's absence, and the diwadnbegi who
was in charge of taxation.!1
The khanate was the home of several monastic orders who sought spiritual
fulfilment and ecstasy by way of asceticism. The heads of these Sufi orders were
greatly revered by the population, and many Abulkhairids were their disciples. The
most influential of these shaikhs and khwajahs were the Juibari shaikhs of the
Nagqshbandi order, who, much more openly than the Jesuits in the CounterReformation, were to exercise a decisive influence on the policies of the rulers for
whom they acted as spiritual directors. The shaikhs were very powerful, for not only
did a disciple (murid) obey his spiritual director (pir) blindly, but he would do his
utmost to elicit his pir's approval. The Juibari shaikhs were well placed to advise the
khans on matters of administration, trade and foreign relations, for they administered
large areas of land of their own, together with numerous shops and vast herds of

9 Materialy, 506-7. During the reign of Iskandar ambassadors to Russia were sent by the appanage
holders of Tashkent (1561, 1575) and Samarqand (1566).

10 He reigned from 1533 to 1540. Iskandar Beg, 65. Dickson, 31.

11 Semenov, “Bukharskii traktat”, 139, 140, 144, 147, 148. The eighteenth century source used here

also mentions the kukeltash in charge of secret information, but it is not clear whether this post
existed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Mahmiid b. Wali, 387b-8b.

The khanate of Ma ward’ al-nahr

cattle and horses,!? and they were in contact with various Muslim rulers.They

received much support from the khans, who were happy to exempt them from taxes
and to provide them with free labour, as needed, for irrigation and other major works.

Numerous taxes were imposed on the rest of the population. Not only were there
land taxes, taxes on water-mills and woodcutting equipment, and taxes on produce,
which applied even to the straw left after the harvest and which varied according to
the crop, but there were also taxes which provided the Treasury with salaries for its
various officials and for the army. Some were in kind, others were in money, and
there was a variety of trade taxes to be paid on transactions, on transporting goods
across regional or other boundaries, and even on the space occupied in the market.
Inhabitants of the khanate were also liable to various corvées and to billeting of
soldiers and ambassadors. They were also expected to provide horses and food for

official envoys and visitors.13
This did not prevent them from taking an active interest in trade. Indeed, from the
khans downwards, the people of the khanate were a nation of traders. The khans sent
trading missions abroad; tribal leaders and officials built caravanserais; merchants and

their slaves travelled as far as Muscovy, Siberia, India and China, regardless of
danger and expense. There was an active colony of Indian merchants in the

khanate,!4 as well as an ancient Jewish community, who probably engaged in
dyeing, silk weaving and a certain amount of trade, as in later centuries.!5
Bukhara in 1550 must have been very similar to the town we know from the
descriptions of medieval Muslim writers and from the report of Anthony Jenkinson
who was there in 1558. It consisted of a walled town and a citadel (ark). The ark
stood on a hill 20 metres high and housed a palace, a prison, a reception area for
foreign envoys, 2 mosques and 2 religious colleges (medressehs). The town was 10
km in circumference. Its houses were made ‘of earth’ (clay mixed with straw) and
they sheltered behind walls also made ‘of earth’, which had been rebuilt during the
previous ten years. The walls boasted 11 gates, each of which was protected by twin
towers. There were 35 town quarters. According to Jenkinson half of these belonged
to the ‘king’ (the appanage holder), and the rest were occupied by merchants and
numerous markets.!© Jenkinson was impressed by the many ‘houses, temples,
monuments of stone (burnt brick?) sumptuously builded, and gilt, and specially
12 Akhmedov,

“Rol”, 17. At his death Khwajah Sa‘d left some

17,000 hectares of land under

cultivation, having increased his father's holdings almost sevenfold. He also owned 1,000 slaves,
2,500 sheep, 1,000 camels, 1,500 horses, 12 bath-houses and 2 caravanserais.

13 Abduraimov, Ocherki, II, 49-51, 150-205.
14 Fitrat, nos. 57, 58. Mukminova, “Skupshchiki”, 155-6.
15 Sukhareva, Bukhara, 167, mentions a separate Jewish quarter in Bukhara now called the mahallayi kuhne, which formed part of the town even before the town walls were reconstructed in the

sixteenth century. Fischel, "The Jews", 43, gives as evidence of Jewish settlement in Bukhara the
fact that a Muslim magician and mystic called in 1240 for the extermination of all the town's
Jews and Christians. For further information about early Jewish settlements in Central Asia, see

Zand "Bukharan Jews", pp. 531-4. See also Meyendorff, 172-3, for three Jewish streets (quarters)
in 1820 Bukhara; Yuldashev, “K voprosu 0 remeslennom proizvodstve”, 34, for Jews as cochineal

dyers, at least in the early eighteenth century; Russko-indiiskie otnosheniya, 154, for mention of
‘David the Bukharan merchant’ in Moscow in 1665, who may have been a Jew, although it is just
as likely that his name was a russianized version of the Muslim name Dawid, adopted in error by
Muscovite officials.
16 Bukhara.

Putevoditel', 76-77. Sukhareva, Kvartal'naya

102. Jenkinson, The Voyage, 469.

obshchina, 303. Bartol'd, Turkestan,

Bukharans: 1550-1702

bathstoves so artificially built that the likes thereof is not in the world’. Houses were
two and three storeys high, and in each quarter there was at least one mosque, one
tree-shaded reservoir, a well and a public bath, together with access to a canal. Within
the town there were ten or more shrines of holy men, much revered by pious
Muslims. There were also cultivated fields and plantations of mulberry and fruitbearing trees, and many ass-driven and water-driven mills.!7
Merchants were accommodated in at least nine caravanserais and also in the
numerous ribat run by the Sufi orders. The caravanserais, which included stables and
shops made of burnt bricks around a courtyard, were used for wholesale trade, but
retail trade took place in a variety of other buildings. There were specialised markets
(bazar) for rope, tent-making materials, saddle-cloth, saddles and food. Saddles and
fruit were also available in the stalls of the timcha, the covered alleys which were

emptied of goods at night and which were protected from mounted visitors by beams
placed 50 centimetres above ground level. Large domed buildings called tim, which
were locked at night, housed specialised shops where materials, haberdashery,
garments and special items such as quivers could be purchased. Finally, there were
much larger domed structures placed at crossroads (tag/chahar su) which were
entirely reserved for one type of trade pursuit, such as moneylending, selling

jewellery or making fur hats.!8
Such was the town that the descendants of Abu ’1-Khair's grandson, Jani Beg

(Bik), the Janibegids, would turn into the capital of the khanate.1!9

17 Thid. Istoriya Tadzhikskogo naroda, Il, ch.1, 399. Iz arkhiva, pass. Sidi Aly, 108-9.

18 See further in Burton, Bukharans in trade, 78n.24, 79n. 28 and 29.

19 bedrea oe oe not be confused with the Ashtarkhanid dynasty, sometimes called
J anid, after
ani
Muhammad, mistakenly thought to have been its founder. See further in B
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1
A new capital: Bukhara

The history of the establishment of Bukhara as capital of Ma wara’ al-nahr is
inextricably bound up with the name of the greatest of the Janibegids, Abu ’1-Ghazi
‘Abdallah Bahadur Khan, generally known as ‘Abdallah Khan or “Abdallah b.
Iskandar. The story began in 1549-50 during the reign of the undistinguished khaqan
‘Abd al-Latif, when ‘Abdallah became for a few months the governor of Bukhara,
contrary to the khaqan's wishes.
The sequence of events leading to his nomination appears to be as follows. In
956/1549 the appanage holder of Bukhara, ‘Abd al-‘Aziz, son of the great khan
‘Ubaidallah, died, leaving no clear successor, for there was some doubt as to the
legitimacy of his closest relative, his nephew Burhan Sultan. In view of this, the
khaqan decided to give Bukhara to Yar Muhammad Sultan, who was “Abd al-‘Aziz's
second cousin and had no appanage rights to it. This the khaqan was perfectly entitled
to do, and his choice seemed a happy one, since the Prince, a man of kindly
disposition, unlikely to cause trouble to his neighbours, was the grandson of the
founder of the dynasty. But ‘Abdallah's uncle, the Janibegid Prince Pir Muhammad,
decided to oppose the khaqan's decision. Perhaps he thought that Yar Muhammad's
known gentleness and refusal to take offence were more suitable for a dervish than
for a ruler. In any case he was unhappy about the situation of his own appanage of
Balkh, dangerously close to the frontiers with Badakhshan and Iranian-held
Khurasan.! He did not like his exposed position on the frontier and preferred the idea
of ruling Bukhara, a town not only renowned for agriculture and trade, religion and
learning, but also situated in the centre of the khanate.
Pir Muhammad accordingly set off for Bukhara, allegedly to pay his last respects
to “Abd al-*Aziz, and seized the town on 3 Sha‘ban 957/18 August 1550.2 ‘Abd alLatif was of course incensed by this act of insubordination, but he was rather
ineffectual, and it took him many months to organise a punitive expedition. In the
meantime Pir Muhammad decided to appoint his nephew Uzbeg Sultan governor.3
His plan, however, did not meet with the approval of the leader of the powerful
Juibari shaikhs of Bukhara. This Muhammad, generally known as Khwajah Islam,
1 Salahetdinova, “Nekotorye dannye”, 239. Yar Muhammad's excessive gentleness was in fact blamed
by a contemporary for the quarrels which later developed among his amirs and his highest officials,
weakening his power as ruler.

2 Muhammad Yar, IVAN Uzb., 74b. Akhmedov, Istoriya, 82.
3 Uzbeg Sultan was the son of Rustam Sultan. Muhammad Yar b. ‘Arab Qataghan, IVAN Uzb.,
77a. Hafiz-i Tanish, chast' I, tr., 88 (his name is not clear in the facsimile of the text).

1550-61

Juibari shaikhs of Bukhara. This Muhammad, generally known as Khwajah Islam,
apparently had other ideas about who should rule the town. He wanted neither Pir
Muhammad, said to be unsound in matters of religion and guilty of ‘improper
actions’,4 nor his nephew. Instead he put forward the candidature of ‘Abdallah, then
aged 17, who was his disciple, as was his father, and for whom he foresaw a brilliant
future. And Pir Muhammad had to comply with his wishes. It is not known what part
‘Abdallah played in the negotiations leading to his appointment, but the ambitious
young man must have been delighted, for his family's appanage of Miyankal, a large
island on the Zeravshan river, although fertile, did not include any major town. And
what a good omen for his future that he should be appointed to rule the former capital
of ‘Ubaidallah, whose military exploits he was eager to emulate!
But “Abdallah's hour of pride and triumph did not last. In mid 958/June 1551 it
was heard that the punitive expedition organised by the khaqan to reinstate Yar
Muhammad was on its way. And when Pir Muhammad was told that the armies of
Samargand and Tashkent were marching through Miyankal to punish the Janibegids
as a whole for his behaviour, he made no effort to defend Bukhara, nor to support his
relatives. He left for Balkh, after surrendering Bukhara to Yar Muhammad, and the
other Janibegids, including ‘Abdallah's father, Iskandar, chose to flee rather than
fight. ‘Abdallah alone was undaunted. While they scattered before the khaqan's
vengeful hosts, he made straight for Miyankal. There he fortified the town of
Karmina and held out so successfully that after 12 days ‘Abd al-Latif 's army gave up

the siege and left.5
A few months later ‘Abd al-Latif died,® to be succeeded some time in 1552 by
Nauruz Ahmad/Buraq Khan of Tashkent, an energetic man determined to be master in
the khanate. ‘Abdallah, who wanted to carve for himself a viable appanage, took
advantage of the period of adjustment that began Nauruz Ahmad's reign in order to
seize Kasbi and Qarshi from the Princes of Samarqand, despite strong disapproval
from Pir Muhammad. His brother ‘Ibadallah followed suit and took Kesh (Shahr-i
sabz). The new khaqan was indignant. His indignation was not diminished by the
knowledge that Khwajah Islam had blessed ‘Abdallah's action and had accordingly
received from him the village of Mudin near Qarshi in token of appreciation. Although
Nauraz Ahmad himself planned to dispossess the appanage holder of Samarqand for
the sole reason that the town would make an ideal capital, he determined to punish
‘Abdallah and his brother and thus prevent any future interference with appanage
arrangements in the khanate.
He gathered a large army and set off against Qarshi, making a bid for Samargand
on the way. When he failed to take this town, he marched on Shahr-i sabz, asking for
support from Burhan Sultan who was by then ruling Bukhara jointly with Yar
4 Sayyid Ahmad, 97b. He was guilty of bada'athayi, karhdyi nashayist, amrhayi nabayist, i.e.
‘innovations and improper actions (strife)’. A few years earlier, he had taken advantage of the death
of his brother Kisten Qara to seize the appanage of Balkh which ought to have gone to his
nephews, and his unbridled greed had been demonstrated again in the case of Bukhara.

5 Vyatkin, “Sheikhi”, 9-10. Hafiz Tanish, 34b-36a. Muhammad Yar, LOIVAN, 133a-b. Akhmedov,
Istoriya, 82-83.
6 Hafiz Tanish, 41a, gives the date of death as 959, i.e. between 29th December 1551 and 17
December 1552. Salahetdinova, Hafiz, 131, places his death in 957/1550.

A new capital

him to
Muhammad. But ‘Abdallah took to the field, defeated Burhan Sultan and put
bitterly
was
who
Ahmad,
flight. Then he marched on to relieve Shahr-i sabz. Nauruz
disappointed by his ally's defeat, had to raise the siege and return to Tashkent. His
anger against ‘Abdallah turned into a deep hatred which developed into a family feud
between his descendants and ‘Abdallah. This feud would cast a shadow over
‘Abdallah's father's reign and cause problems for ‘Abdallah during a period of almost
35 years.”
However, as Nauraz Ahmad's main objective in the immediate future was to
secure the town of Samarqand, he temporarily forgot about ‘Abdallah. In Rajab
961/June 1554, he marched on Samarqand and succeeded in taking it. ‘Abdallah's
efforts to retain the town for the appanage holder, Sultan Sa‘id, only reinforced the
khaqan's determination to crush the young man's rebellious spirit, so he followed up
his victory with a march on Miyankal. Once again ‘Abdallah's relatives fled in terror
before the ruler's army but ‘Abdallah stood firm, this time in Qarshi. In the event, he
was defeated by an enormous army under the khaqan's son, Baba Sultan, and he
retired to the safety of Balkh, but not for long. About a year later, in August 1555, he
crossed the Amu-Darya again in response to a message from Bukhara. Burhan
Sultan, who had angered Nauraz Ahmad by arranging the dastardly murder of his coruler, Yar Muhammad, was under siege. He wrote to ‘Abdallah asking for help and
promising to give him the town if he could but raise the siege, an offer which
‘Abdallah accepted with alacrity. He raised the siege in a brilliant campaign, defeating
the army sent by Nauruz Ahmad, and true to his word, Burhan Sultan handed over
Bukhara and left for Qarakul.®
Five years after his first appointment as governor, “Abdallah was thus once more
in control of Bukhara. He must have been delighted at this turn of events, but his
hour had not yet come. This time his tenure of office lasted only a few days. Burhan
Sultan soon regretted his generosity. He marched on Bukhara with an army,
whereupon ‘Abdallah's forces melted away and the young man had no option but to
leave the town.
Less than a year later “Abdallah was back in the area at the request of several
Bukharan amirs who had rebelled in protest against Burhan Sultan's ‘improper’
words and actions, and against his excessive reliance on the Qizil Ayak Turkmen. In
the spring of 1556 the amirs had seized the fortress of Qarakil. When ‘Abdallah
joined them Burhan Sultan asked the khaqan for help and Nauriz Ahmad came over
with an enormous army. He set siege to Qarakil, but, although this army was said to
number 200,000,? ‘Abdallah and his men were undaunted. They engaged the enemy
repeatedly and, after several days the besieging army was forced to enter into
negotiations. An agreement was reached which enabled Nauriz Ahmad and Burhan
Sultan to return respectively to Samarqand and Bukhara, while ‘Abdallah left for
Jijektu and Maimana. He was well satisfied with the success achieved, for he had
defended Qarakil, humiliated the khaqan and Burhan Sultan, and secured the support

7 Hafiz Tanish, 41a-b. Vyatkin, “Sheikhi“, 11.
8 Hafiz Tanish, 42b-47a. Howorth, II, ii, 727, says Nauraz Ahmad offered Bukhara to ‘Abdallah
after
Burhan disposed of his co-ruler, but this is not borne out by the evidence of Hafiz Tanish.
9 Not 2,000 as in Salahetdinova's translation. Hafiz-i Tanish, chast' I, 186.
.

1550-61

and gratitude of all those who opposed and resented Burhan Sultan.10
Another year would pass before ‘Abdallah entered Bukhara again, but this time he
would keep the town for good. In the meantime Nauraz Ahmad had tried again to
crush the Janibegids, using weapons and soldiers lent to him by Sulaiman the
Magnificent, but he had no greater success. Then on 5 Dhi al-qa‘da 963/10
September 1556 he died of drunkenness in Samargand.!!
His successor was none other than ‘Abdallah's uncle, Pir Muhammad, a fact
which ‘Abdallah celebrated by chasing Nauraz Ahmad's sons from Miyankal and
taking Samarqand from them, in order to return it to its righteous holders. Next he
marched on Bukhara and besieged the town, ignoring an attack on Karmina by
Burhan Sultan, which had been conceived as a delaying tactic. The siege lasted some
two months during May and June 964/1557. Great losses were sustained on both
sides, due as much to the heat as to Burhan Sultan's determination and to his skill as a
general. Finally, however, he was compelled to sue for peace. He sent Khwajah
Islam to conduct the negotiations on his behalf, but while the khwajah was in
“Abdallah's camp, Burhan Sultan was murdered. His assassin appears to have been a
falconer and an admirer or follower of Khwajah Islam's and, perhaps because of his
association with birds of prey, he did not shrink, as Papageno might have done, from
an action which he knew would please the khwajah. Next day the town opened its

doors to ‘Abdallah.!2
Abdallah's soldiers must have been delighted with their victory, but if they hoped
for a rest, they were disappointed. Under ‘Abdallah's first cousin, the Janibegid
Khusrau Sultan, they were sent to take the town of Nesef (Qarshi) from a Prince of
the house of Samarqand called Khudai Birdi Sultan. This was because ‘Abdallah
considered Qarshi as part of the appurtenances of Bukhara. He expected little trouble
from Khudai Birdi, perhaps because he had recently helped two relatives of Khudai
Birdi's to regain the Kuchkunchid appanage of Samarqand, these Princes being
respectively Khudai Birdi's brother, Jawanmard ‘Ali, and his cousin Gadai Sultan,

son of the former khagan ‘Abd al-Latif.!3 But the expedition was unsuccessful for
Khudai Birdi stood firm. After a month Khusrau Sultan gave up the siege and retired
to Shahr-i sabz. According to Hafiz Tanish this was because ‘the pillars of the state’
10 It is not known what happened to the rebel amirs, but Salahetdinova ("Nekotorye dannye", 240)
suggests that they might have been executed after “Abdallah's departure.

11 Wafiz Tanish, 47b-49b. Muhammad Yar, IVAN Uzb., 75a, places Nauriz Ahmad's death on 18
Dhi al-qa‘da. Vyatkin, “Materialy”, 28. Hasan-i Ramlu, 510, says Naurtz Ahmad was 56. He
was killed by the son of his secretary, who was trying to reject his (amorous) approaches.
Hammer, Geschichte, I, 254.

12 Hafiz Tanish, 49b-56a. Sidi Aly, 99, 106-7, tells how Burhan Sultan offered Bukhara to the

Sultan, after recovering Qarakal from Pir Muhammad's younger brother (?“Abdallah), as he was
then hard pressed by (Nauriz Ahmad's son) Khwarazmshah. Vyatkin, “Sheikhi", 13-14. Hasan-i
Rumi, tr. 175 and notes, gives two other versions of Burhan Sultan's death, one being that he
was killed by a boy who attracted him, and the other being that he was murdered at the behest of
the elders of Bukhara, who were disgusted by his cruelty. Vambéry, History, 283, gives the
motive for the murder as anger at Burhan's debauchery. Jenkinson, The Voyage, 470, says

Khwajah Islam killed Burhan himself.

13 Mahmud b .Wali, no 1375, 132b.
11

A new capital

(the amirs) suggested that ‘Abdallah march there himself as Khudai Birdi would no
doubt surrender the town on hearing of his arrival. It is more likely, however, that
‘Abdallah wanted his soldiers back in case they were needed to defend Bukhara
against attack. While the siege of Qarshi was in progress the former ruler of
Samarqand, Sultan Sa‘id, had returned from exile in Kashghariya. During the month
of Tir (June-July), and with the support of a Kashghariyan army, he had retaken the
town from ‘Abdallah's protégés, Jawanmard ‘Ali and Gadai Sultan.!4 Since he might
be expected to follow this up by marching on Bukhara, ‘Abdallah wanted to be fully
prepared.
Sultan Sa‘id, however, made no effort to attack Bukhara. ‘Abdallah took no
action, therefore, to reinstate Jawanmard ‘Ali and Gadai Sultan. In the spring of 1558
he set off instead for Qarshi, which he was determined to add to his possessions.
However, he made no progress with the siege, chiefly because Khudai Birdi had
received reinforcements from Samarqand. Two. months later an exchange of
appanages was suggested. Khudai Birdi agreed to surrender Qarshi. “Abdallah let him
have Sagharj, north of Miyankal, which he had earlier given to his own brother,
‘Ibadallah, and ‘Ibadallah received in compensation three districts of the town of
Bukhara. ‘Abdallah then returned to Bukhara after confirming his brother Dustum's
appointment to Kasbi and adding Qarshi to his cousin Khusrau's holding of Shahr-i
sabz.15 The pattern was set for the future: ‘Abdallah would dispose of the towns he
conquered as he saw fit, and none of his family would dare to object.
‘Abdallah then gave himself up to his favourite pastime, the hunt, in the rich
hunting country around Qarshi, much to the anger of Khwajah Islam, who felt that
the young man should show himself worthy of the rich prize of Bukhara by devoting
his time to administering the area. But ‘Abdallah was far from idle. Although only 25,
he began to send embassies abroad and to make himself known well beyond the
frontiers of the khanate. Straight after the conquest of Bukhara he had sent envoys to
Moscow to promote trade with Muscovy. In 1558 two further envoys were
despatched to request free access and protection for Bukharan merchants.!© ‘Abdallah
was keen to know more about recent developments in Muscovy where Ivan IV (the
Terrible) had annexed the Muslim khanates of Kazan' in 1552 and Astrakhan in 1556.
His successes against Kazan' and Astrakhan had established Muscovy as a power to

be reckoned with in the east and had given the Tsar control of the great trading
waterways of the Volga and Kama, with access to the Caspian. This was a
momentous development from every point of view, and in particular in relation to
trade, an important activity since the tenth century and earlier, between Bukhara and
the Volga region.!7 ‘Abdallah, whose main source of income came from the sales
dues paid by merchants, was anxious that this trade should continue. And Khwajah
14 Sultan Sa‘id had been exiled by Nauriz Ahmad for failing to relieve Burhan Sultan in 1555.
Khudai Birdi and Jawanmard ‘Ali were Sultan Sa‘id's brothers.
15 Hafiz Tanish, 58b-59a. Diastim had been named to Kasbi the previous summer. N.B. Hasan-i
Rumlu, 510, mentions an earlier attack on the khanate by an army from Kashghariya which he
places shortly after Nauruz Ahmad's death in 963, i.e. before 3 November 1556, and which was

apparently led by the ruler of Kashghariya, Rashid Khan.
16 Zhukovskii, 3-4. Polnoe sobranie russkikh letopisei, XIII, 313, 318.

17 Allworth, 19. Pares, 132-3.
12

1550-61

Islam, who himself sent merchants to Moscow and Kazan',!8 must have approved of
the despatch of envoys to the ruler of Muscovy, even though ‘Abdallah was thereby
establishing links with an Infidel.
“Abdallah's friendly overtures were well received. Ivan the Terrible was trying to
break out of the straitjacket imposed upon Muscovy, both by the Tatars in the south,
and by the Teutonic Orders, Poland and Sweden in the north. Even more than

‘Abdallah, Ivan was conscious of the value of trade: he had in fact agreed to give
enormous concessions to English merchants in 1555 in the hope of receiving support,
trained personnel and materials, for his foreign wars. Not only had he exempted
English merchants from dues and from the jurisdiction of local courts, but he had at
once agreed to the suggestion by Anthony Jenkinson that he should explore the
possibilities of trade with Cathay via Bukhara.!9 Providing Jenkinson with letters of
recommendation and escorts, Ivan IV eagerly awaited the Englishman's return,
realising that his own position on the overland route to Bukhara and China could best
be exploited if he permitted access to this route in exchange for trade and other
concessions.
Jenkinson left Moscow in April 1558 and arrived in Bukhara in December.
‘Abdallah welcomed him warmly, invited him to dine at his table, and showed great
interest in every aspect of Muscovite life, including its religion and laws. He also
questioned Jenkinson about Turkey, carefully examined his handguns, had them tried
out and tried them out himself. Hearing that Jenkinson had been waylaid on his way,
‘Abdallah reacted both swiftly and energetically, much to the Englishman's
admiration. Although Jenkinson would later write condescendingly about the power
and riches of ‘this barbarous king’, and about the doubtful advantages of trading with
Bukhara, he was so impressed by “Abdallah's response that he felt obliged to ‘praise
and commend’ him in his report to the Company. ‘Abdallah, he explained, sent 100
men at once to apprehend the robbers, then he had four of them hanged at the gates of
his palace as a warning to others, and finally he restored some of Jenkinson's goods.

“Abdallah's behaviour towards him was in fact unimpeachable. On leaving Bukhara
early in 1559 to fight one of his kinsmen he gave orders for Jenkinson to be paid for
his goods and for an ambassador to be despatched who would accompany him back
to Moscow.2° Jenkinson should therefore have been satisfied with his stay, for he
also managed to conduct a thorough investigation into Bukhara as a centre for trade.
However, he complained in his report that in the event he was ‘forced to rebate in
part, and to take wares as payment for the rest contrary to (his) expectations’,
although he realised that ‘of a begger better paiment I could not have, and glad I was
so to be paid and dispatched’.

Jenkinson left Bukhara on 8th March 1559 after a two and a half months' stay,?!
travelling with the spring caravan to the Caspian. He was much impressed with the
power of the ‘Metropolitane’ (Khwajah Islam) who, being ‘more obeyed than the

18 Badr al-Din, 90a.
19 pares, 133-5. Kusheva, 226. Sweden had already granted trade concessions to Muscovites in return
for permission to trade with Bukhara, China and Iran via Muscovy.

20 Jenkinson, The Voyage, 471-2.
21 27 February Old Style.
13

A new capital

King’, insisted on the strict observance of the temperance laws.22 Khwajah Islam
was then at the height of his power. His name was known and respected from the
Ural river to Kashghariya, and soon a grandiose building project to honour his
grandfather's remains would spread his fame even further. This project, which was
then in its initial stages and would take ten years to complete, was undertaken by
‘Abdallah on the khwajah's behalf. A large estate was created which included a Sufi
monastery (khangah), a religious college and a mosque. Several canals were dug so
that the unpromising land could bear thousands of fruit-producing and exotic trees.
Some time after Jenkinson's departure ‘Abdallah got married. He chose as his
bride a Khwarazmian Princess from Marw in northern Khurasan. His choice must
have been approved by Khwajah Islam, for the khwajah's son went to Marw to make
the necessary arrangements. Yet it cannot have been an easy choice in view of the
bitter feud which had existed in the past between the bride's father, Din Muhammad,

and ‘Ubaidallah Khan. ‘Abdallah no doubt took into account the known hostility of
Din Muhammad and his brother ‘Ali towards the rulers of Safawid Iran. An alliance
with them would be most useful when he began to campaign in Iranian-held

Khurasan.?3
The province of Khurasan, situated between the Amu-Darya and Iran, had been a
source of contention between the khanate and Iran ever since Shah Isma‘il had seized
it at the death of Muhammad Shaibani. Shah Isma‘il having also temporarily
conquered Khwarazm, there was no love lost between the Sunnis of Khwarazm and
Ma wara‘ al-nahr, on the one hand, and the Shi‘a rulers of Iran on the other.
Religious considerations only made matters worse. In the khanate hatred for the
‘heretic’ Safawids and their people was such that those who went to Iran brought
their friends pieces of underwear or skeins of cotton dipped in Iranian blood as
souvenirs. If they had to stay for any length of time on business they were even
known to commit suicide on their return, because they felt thoroughly unclean as a
result of their visit. But, just as Sunni theologians (‘ulama) would order them to ‘kill
and destroy... those who gave up the Sunni doctrine, accepted the abominable Shi‘a
rite and reviled the three Caliphs’, the Iranian populace would make a point of cursing
the revered Caliph ‘Umar loudly in the presence of visitors from the khanate, in order
to provoke them into a fight. The seventeenth-century French traveller Chardin was
told that on one such occasion ‘tout le train d'un Ambassadeur fut ainsi tué &
saccagé’.24 Religious animosity had also resulted in the wholesale massacre of
civilians in the past by both sides, in Khurasan and in the khanate. And none of the
Abulkhairids could forget that Shah Isma‘il had used Muhammad Shaibani's skull as

a drinking-cup.25
22 Jenkinson, The Voyage, 470.
23 Hafiz Tanish, 58b, 60a-b, gives the general date of 966/October 1558-September 1559 for
“Abdallah's marriage, and since Jenkinson does not mention the event, it seems safe to assume
that it took place after the Englishman left Bukhara in March 1559. Aba *1-Ghazi, tr. 229-30,

238-40, 241-3, 254, 258. Hasan-i Rumi, tr. 152, text 402-3.

24 Chardin, II, Voyages, 240-1. Hanway, 243, found similarly in the early eighteenth century. He
wrote that the people of the khanate ‘never omit to wash themselves immediately after leaving
their (the Persians') company’. Iskandar Beg, 390.

25 For the fate of Muhammad Shaibani's corpse, see Istoriya Uzbekskoi SSR, 1, 517 and Savory,

1550-61

‘Abdallah was therefore eager to follow in the footsteps of ‘Ubaidallah Khan,
who had repeatedly attacked Khurasan and had taken the major town of Herat from
Iran on more than one occasion. ‘Abdallah’ first attempt to march on Herat, in June
1552, had been stopped by his uncle, Pir Muhammad, who strongly disapproved of
what he regarded as a hopeless expedition. The young man, however, was
determined to try again, and he may have hoped for Khwarazmian support after his

marriage to a Khwarazmian Princess.?6
Meanwhile, in the spring of 1559 the ‘ruler of Samarqand’ (Sultan Sa‘id?)
apparently took advantage of ‘Abdallah's absence from Bukhara to besiege the town.
He does not appear, however, to have seriously threatened ‘Abdallah's control, for,
although Jenkinson was told about the attack and rejoiced that he himself was no
longer in Bukhara, Abdallah's biographer does not even mention it. Some 18 months
later, in late Dh al-qa‘da 967/August 1560, an event of far greater significance took
place: “Abdallah crossed swords for the first time with the ruler of Badakhshan, Mirza
Sulaiman, also called Shah Sulaiman. The mirza, who was distantly related to the

Mughal Emperor Akbar,?’ had ruled Badakhshan, a province adjacent to Balkh, since
1529, when he had received it from Akbar's grandfather, Babur. Ambitious and
aggressive, he had coveted Balkh and Kabul for many years, and had actually taken
Balkh for a short while in 1545. When he attacked the province in 1560 Pir
Muhammad tried to buy him off with the towns of Khulm and Akbak, while he sent
to ‘Abdallah for help.28 As soon as he received his uncle's message ‘Abdallah set off
with a small group of amirs, gave battle and defeated the mirza's army. Mirza
Sulaiman then fled towards Badakhshan and got away but his son, Mirza Ibrahim,
who fled by another route, was taken prisoner. Pir Muhammad was delighted with
“Abdallah's success and with the quick resolution of the crisis, but he did not make
the most of his new position of strength. Instead of using his valuable prisoner in
order to negotiate a lasting peace with Mirza Sulaiman, he took fright at the young
man's popularity and, fearing an uprising in his favour, he had Mirza Ibrahim put to

death.?9
As the execution took place in Balkh some 40 days after ‘Abdallah had returned to
Bukhara, he could not in any way be held responsible for this vindictive act. Pir
Muhammad, however, was shown to be neither a warrior, nor even a diplomat, and

this cannot have helped his standing in the khanate. Abdallah's reputation as a
competent and successful general, on the other hand, was now firmly established. He
had also earned Pir Muhammad's gratitude and felt sure that his uncle would no
longer stop him from campaigning in Khurasan. He prepared for a campaign and set

History, 61. For the sectarian killings and desecrations perpetrated by both sides, see Iskandar
Beg, 64-5; Dickson, 91, 242, 321, 327-9; Muhammad Yusuf Munshi, 240a.
26 About ‘Ubaidallah, see Dickson, pass., and Iskandar Beg, 50-66. Hafiz Tanish, 36b.

27 According to Muhammad Jahangir Khan, 18, he was the grandson of Babur's uncle, Sultan
Mahmid Mirza.

28 Akbak has not been found.

29 Akhmedovy, Istoriya, 186, 86. Abi ’I-Fadl, Akbarndma, II, 123-5. Hafiz Tanish, 61a-63a. The
Prince's execution probably took place in October 1560. Muhammad Yar, IVAN Uzb., 75a, says
the young Prince was put to death after only 15 days in captivity.

A new capital

off for the Amu-Darya with an army in April 1561, having heard that Shah Isma‘il's
successor, Shah Tahmasp, was making difficulties for pilgrims on their way to
Mecca. When he reached the river he received a message from his uncle, who asked
to meet him in order to discuss how they might combine their forces for the
campaign.
The meeting took place at Shiburghan, south-west of Balkh, but instead of

mentioning the campaign Pir Muhammad offered to exchange appanages with him.7°
The wily old man had probably realized that his decision to execute the Badakhshani

Prince had been foolish. He may have feared reprisals from Mirza Sulaiman, perhaps
with some backing from Akbar, Akbar being not only related to the mirza, but also
anxious to recover the patrimony of his Timurid ancestors.*! ‘Abdallah, on the other
hand, was not afraid of war, and he thought Balkh a more convenient base for future

expeditions to Khurasan. He therefore accepted his uncle's offer. Envoys were sent
to seize Bukhara on behalf of Pir Muhammad and to bring over “Abdallah's relatives,
but at this stage Pir Muhammad's son, Din Muhammad, who had looked forward to
inheriting Balkh, rebelled and marched on the town. Khwajah Islam, who was in
Bukhara, regarded this as a godsend, for he was indignant about the agreement and
he particularly resented “Abdallah's failure to consult him.
‘Abdallah at once called off the deal, and, with a new realisation of the value of
Bukhara, he decided to turn the town into his capital. When he returned there he also
took a first important step towards seizing power in the khanate: he had his father,
Iskandar, brought to Bukhara from Karmina and without further ado had him
proclaimed khan in Sha‘ban/April 1561. Although by his action he had flouted the
twin traditions of seniority rule and election of the khaqan by his fellow-Princes, there
was no outcry in the khanate. This may have been because he seems to have refrained
at first from having the khutbah read in his father's name. Even in Bukhara he was
careful to have his uncle mentioned, together with his father, in the khutbah, with the

name of ‘khagan’ applied to his uncle.32 However, shortly afterwards, and certainly
during 969 (11 September 1561-30 August 1562), he completed the takeover by
issuing coins in his father's name in Samarqand, and even in Balkh.33

30 Thid., 63b.
31 Noér, II, 120.
32 Hafiz Tanish, 63b-64b. Akhmedov, Istoriya, 87, insists that ‘Abdallah had
his uncle's name
erased from the khutbah. Hasan-i Ramla, 510, says that Pir Muhammad was forced
to coin in
Iskandar's name.
33 Davidovich, “Klad” in Material naya kul'tura, 218. See further about Iskandar
Khan's accession
in Burton, "The Accession".

2
Iskandar's reign and the struggle for control
(1561-1583)

The first few years of Iskandar's reign were peaceful. Indeed it seemed as if he would
be accepted by his kinsmen, although he had not been properly nominated khaqan,
and may have been younger than two of his brothers - Pir Muhammad and
Sulaiman.! In Dhi ’1-qa‘da 971/August 1564 he was even visited by three of Nauriz
Ahmad's sons (Darwish, Tahir, Qasim), who came specifically to pay homage to him
as ruler, and to offer him their friendship. However, things changed as soon as Pir
Muhammad died in 1567, for with his passing Iskandar lost a valuable supporter, and
any claim to legality as ruler by proxy.
Before that happened, Pir Muhammad was to play the leading part in a farcical
episode involving Iran. Having failed to acquire Bukhara in 1561, he had feared an
attack by his neighbours, but this had not materialised. Instead of invading in
retaliation for the death of Muhammad Ibrahim, Mirza Sulaiman had turned his
attention to Kabul, which he attempted to take over. In 1563 he married his daughter
to the young governor of this town, Muhammad Hakim, who happened to be Akbar's
half-brother. He followed this by appointing a de facto governor of his own to the
province and by distributing much of the land to his soldiers, an unpopular measure
which eventually led to the expulsion of his officials from Kabul and to all-out war

between the mirza and his son-in-law.?
Meanwhile, in the south-west Shah Tahmasp of Iran seemed full of goodwill
towards Pir Muhammad and the other Princes of the khanate. In 970 (between 31
August 1562 and 21 August 1563) he even sent a mission to the khanate, with gifts
for Pir Muhammad, ‘Abdallah and Sultan Sa‘id of Samarqand.* Although this could
be taken as a genuine expression of friendly intent, Pir Muhammad must have realised
that the Shah was only trying to prevent them from joining forces with the Ottomans
and with ‘Ali of Khwarazm, who had raided Khurasan three times since 1557. In fact

these gifts had come to the Shah from Istanbul and by distributing them to the Princes
1 Mahmid b. Wali (excerpts in Materialy), 356-7. The evidence provided by Hafiz Tanish (21b,
49b) is not clear. He places Iskandar before Sulaiman and Pir Muhammad when listing the sons of
Jani Bik, but later explains that at the death of Nauriz Ahmad, Pir Muhammad was elected khan

because he (and presumably not Iskandar) was the oldest surviving Prince. See also Burton “The
Accession’.

2 Hafiz Tanish, 67a-b.
3 Aba ’1-Qadir, II, 62, 72, 88-89. Samsam, III, 270 and ff.
4 Hasan-i Ramla, 419, 402-3, 413, 418. Iskandar Beg, 116

Iskandar's reign

of Ma wara’ al-nahr Shah Tahmasp was showing contempt for the Ottoman Sultan,
while also trying to compromise the Princes in his eyes. Shah Tahmasp certainly had
little love for the Uzbegs in general, and either because he wished to retaliate against
‘Ali of Khwarazm or because he knew of ‘Abdallah's ambitions in Khurasan, he had
asked the Ottomans for help against them in June 1562.° Sulaiman the Magnificent
had flatly refused this suggestion on the grounds that religious considerations
prevented him from forming an alliance with a Shi‘a against the Uzbeg Sunnis.
Whether or not Pir Muhammad knew about this, he shared the Sultan's dislike for the
Shi‘a ruler. He decided to ignore his recent gifts as a mere propitiating gesture and to
attack Khurasan with a view to gaining some prestige in the khanate and in Istanbul.
He may have also wished to demonstrate his goodwill towards the Ottomans and to
follow up an earlier offer of help, made in the days (1559-61) when Shah Tahmasp,
posing as the protector of the Sulaiman the Magnificent's rebel son Bayazid, refused

to return the Prince to his father.®
Ignoring therefore Shah Tahmasp's friendly overtures, Pir Muhammad marched
against the town of Mashhad in Khurasan some time in 971 (after 21 August 1563).”
On arriving outside this town with a large army, he must have been acutely
disappointed. He found neither a supporting army from “Ali Sultan, as expected, nor
any news of diversionary activity on the Turkish front. In the circumstances it seemed
much safer for him to return to Balkh, and he did so, after a few days of half-hearted
siege. Before leaving he had presents distributed to the shaikhs in charge of the most
holy tomb of the eight imam, ‘Ali Rida, and from Balkh he sent profuse apologies to
the Shah. To his relief, these were graciously accepted and an Iranian ambassador
was despatched to accompany his envoy back to Balkh.8
No more is heard of Pir Muhammad after this ridiculous campaign. He died some
time after July 1567, following a brief visit early that month from ‘Abdallah and
others of his relatives who were on their way to attack Khurasan.?
This time “Abdallah did get to Khurasan, where he intended to take advantage of a
change of governor to rid the province of ‘the dust of heresy and darkness of
tyranny’. More practical considerations may have been his need for rich booty and the
hope of establishing control over the Khurasan trade routes to India and China, trade
being always at the forefront of ‘Abdallah's mind. Since 1558 he had tried to develop his connection with Muscovy with two further embassies, requesting free entry into
the country for official traders in 1564, and general access to Astrakhan, Kazan' and
‘other towns’ for all traders in 1566.19 In the case of Astrakhan, it was to become
clear that he considered the town as more than a worthwhile trade centre: it was also a
5 The Princes of Khwarazm and Ma wara’ al-nahr were all of Uzbeg stock, as were many of their
people. The word “Uzbeg’ has therefore been omitted, whenever possible, in this study, and when
referring to the rulers and the peoples of the two khanates the words Khwarazmians and Bukharans
have been used throughout. Hammer, Geschichte, II, 281-2.
6 De Busbecq, 261. The French ambassador to Istanbul who was there at the time reported that “The

Hircanians and the posterity of Tamerlane were soliciting to join arms’ against Iran.

7 Hasan-i Romld, 421.

8 Sharaf al-Din, II, 221. Iskandar Beg, 94.
9 Hafiz Tanish, 69a, 74a, makes it clear that he was alive in early July, which conflicts with the
evidence quoted in Akhmedov, /storiya, 87 and in Davidovich, “Serebryanye monety”, 86,
according to which he died on 20 Sha‘ban 974/2 March 1567. Muhammad Yar, IVAN Uzb. 75a,
gives the date of his death as 3 Sha‘ban 974/13 February 1567.

10 Materialy, 404-5.

1561-83

useful stopover for Bukharan pilgrims who wanted to avoid Iran on their way to
Mecca. When this route was interrupted around 1568, and Abdallah's ambassadors
were detained in Muscovy, allegedly for their own safety, he was quick to make his
complaints known to the Ottoman Sultan, Selim I, and the Sultan acted energetically
on his behalf. First, he instructed the Khan of Crimea to write a strong letter of
protest to the Muscovite authorities, complaining that they blocked the route to the
Muslim Holy Places and ill-treated Muslim visitors. Then in 1569 Selim II mounted
an expedition against Astrakhan to secure the town for the benefit of Islam and of his
Treasury. The expedition was not successful, but when it turned out to be a failure he
continued to write to Ivan IV about the problems faced by Bukharan pilgrims and

ambassadors until they were resolved satisfactorily.1!
To return to ‘Abdallah's campaign into Khurasan

in July 1567, he was
accompanied on this occcasion by his brother ‘Ibadallah and by two Princes from the
house of Samarqand. They intercepted the new governor, Shah Tahmasp's son,
Sultan Muhammad Khudabanda, who was on his way to take up his post, and forced
him to seek refuge in Turbat. They then seized the fort of Zawah and massacred its
inhabitants. They went on to besiege Turbat and were making good progress when
suddenly they abandoned the siege and returned to the khanate. Before leaving, they
took the precaution of devastating the countryside around these towns, but this was
an amazing volte-face which historians have been at pains to explain. Iranian writers
suggested that discord among the ‘Uzbeg Sultans’, as well as fear of massive Iranian
reinforcements known to be on their way, led a certain Khusrau Sultan to withdraw

his troops, after which ‘Abdallah was forced to raise the siege.!2 But in fact it seems
that ‘Abdallah was more concerned about the stability of the khanate and about a
possible threat to his father's position. Pir Muhammad had recently died and it was
possible that another of Iskandar's brothers, Sulaiman, might make a bid for the
throne on grounds of seniority.!3 In any case ‘Abdallah's cousin Khusrau, whom he
had earlier appointed to Qarshi and Shahr-i sabz, had begun to show signs of
hostility. Under the influence of seditious elements (fitna wa fasad) he had already
left the front once without permission, making for Shahr-i sabz. Although ‘Abdallah
persuaded him to return and to march with him against the Iranian army, shortly
afterwards Khusrau had again ‘raised the head of opposition’ (sar mu‘anadat) and
left for the khanate. This time he left ‘the path of agreement’ and he took with him Din
Muhammad of Balkh, who was known for his ambition and unruliness. “Abdallah

therefore had to return to the khanate to make sure that they caused no trouble.!4
Knowing full well that his father, said to be simple-minded,!° was more
interested in prayer than in government and would certainly be unable to cope with the
11 Kusheva, 252. Bukharan complaints are dealt with in further detail in Burton, “Relations between

the khanate of Bukhara and Ottoman Turkey”

12 Sharaf al-Din, II, 232. Hasan-i Romld, 430. Iskandar Beg, 93.
13 Muhammad Yar (LOIVAN, 113a, 117b) and Mahmid b.Wali (IVAN Uzb.1375, 132a), both seem
to suggest that he was older than Iskandar, but this is not the view of the anonymous author of
the Sheibaniyada (L, LXXVIII), nor of ‘Abdallah's biographer who makes Sulaiman younger
than Iskandar. However, Hafiz Tanish's evidence cannot be taken as conclusive, since he gives

totally contradictory information about the relative ages of Pir Muhammad and Iskandar (see note
1 above).

14 Wafiz Tanish, 69a-7 1a.
15 Zambaur. Abi ’1-Ghazi, tr. 193, text, 183. Bartol'd, Sochineniya, I, 521. He apparently only
excelled at keeping every religious tenet and commandment, and at leading a hunt.

Iskandar's reign

emergency, ‘Abdallah marched back to put things right. He did so very swiftly, for
the people of Bukhara, and the new leader of the Jaibari shaikhs, Khwajah Sa‘d,
were on his side. They went out of the town to welcome him with gifts and later paid
homage to him and his father. ‘Abdallah then appointed his uncle Sulaiman to govern
Dabusi in Miyankal and, rather than chastise his cousins, left Khusrau Sultan in
control of Shahr-i sabz.!© He also formally appointed Din Muhammad to the
govemorship of Balkh, which this Prince had held unofficially since 1561. Having
thus reasserted his power and disposed of his problems, ‘Abdallah was able to return
to Khurasan some two months later. This time he made for his wife's hometown of
Marw, then temporarily under Iranian domination, and situated much nearer the
khanate. He pressed the siege vigorously and was about to order the final assault
when his advisers suggested that he should destroy instead the dam supplying the
town with water, and then withdraw. This would eventually force the people to
capitulate, whereas an assault would lead to (loss of life) and even to an empty victory
if the defenders should decide to set the town on fire. “Abdallah accepted their
suggestion and, well satisfied with his achievement so far, he returned to the

khanate.!7
‘Abdallah probably intended to go again to Khurasan the following year in order
to consolidate and extend his conquest, but this was not to be. For the next 15 years
he would have to forget about foreign conquest. His main task would be to establish
his father's and his own authority over the khanate in the face of the implacable
hostility of his kinsmen, the Abilkhairid Princes of Samarqand, Turkestan and
Balkh, the most dangerous of whom was Baba Sultan, son of Nauruz Ahmad. From
the time of his father's death in 1556, Baba Sultan had taken no interest in the internal

affairs of the khanate, probably because he was defending the eastern approaches of
the khanate, and in particular his fief of Turkestan, against his fierce nomadic

neighbours, the Qazags.!8
These were Turkic-speaking nomads living in the Dasht-i Qipchaq east of
Tashkent, which stretched from the Ala Tau to the Irtysh. Although by the admission
of Muhammad Shaibani's courtier and historian, Fadl Allah b. Ruzbikhan, they
shared a common origin with the Noghays and with the inhabitants of the khanate, the
Qazaqs had little love for either. They had acquired their name, said to mean either
‘runaways’ or ‘wandering free men’, when they ‘ran away’ from the steppes of
Qipchaq to Kashghariya/Moghulistan, to preserve their independence from
Muhammad Shaibani's grandfather, Abu ’l-Khair. Since then they had made a
practice of raiding the towns of the Syr-Darya, forcing Muhammad Shaibani to
undertake several campaigns against them. He was anxious to protect the wealth of
the khanate, and his subjects’ religious beliefs, from these lapsed Muslims, who

16 Whatever threat Sulaiman might have presented, he does not appear to have issued coins, despite
an earlier belief that this had indeed happened, based on coins which turned out to have been
issued, not by him, but by Mirza Sulaiman of Badakhshan. See Davidovich, (‘Serebryanye
monety’, 82, and Korpus, 129-30), and Burton "The accession".

17 Hafiz Tanish, 71b-72b, 74a, 83b.
18 Jenkinson, The Voyage, 473, appeared to be referring to the Qazaqs when he mentioned in 1559
the “barbarous fielde people’ of Tashkent. He explained that their wars against the people of
Kashghar, which had by then lasted three years, had put an end to the caravan trade from Bukhara
to Cathay.

1561-83

combined Islamic observance with pagan practices.!9 The Qazaqs were feared in the
khanate because they sold their Muslim captives into slavery, and because they looked
fierce, dressing in hides ‘like wolves’, with their eyes ‘hidden in the folds of their
eyebrows’.?° About 30 years earlier their khan, Buidash, had tried to seize the town
of Sairam, not far from Turkestan, but he had been killed with 20 other Qazaq
Princes, after which date the Qazaqs had concentrated their energies on fighting the
Qalmaq, a new wave of nomads from the east, who threatened their camping-

grounds.?!

After Pir Muhammad's death Baba Sultan began to take a much greater interest in
the affairs of the khanate and he was a thorn in ‘Abdallah's side until his death in

1582.

However, the first rebellions which ‘Abdallah and his father had to face, although
supported by Baba Sultan and his fellow Suyinchids, were not initiated by him, but
by the princes of the house.of Samarqand (Kichkinchids). In December 1567 a son
of “Abdallah's former protégé Jawanmard ‘Ali, called Abi ’1-Khair Sultan, attacked
and took Shahr-i sabz from ‘Abdallah's cousin Khusrau. ‘Abdallah came to the
rescue, but soon had to leave in order to defend Bukhara, threatened by the combined
armies of Samarqand, Tashkent, Turkestan and Khujand led by Jawanmard ‘Ali, his
brother Sultan Sa‘id, and Baba Sultan. That Sultan Sa‘id, who had ruled Samarqand
since 1557, should have acted thus was as surprising as it was disappointing, for he
had only just returned from Khurasan, where he had been supporting ‘Abdallah's
army. The rebellion of these Princes was a serious challenge to ‘Abdallah and his
father. It would stretch their military resources to the full as their enemies grew in
number to include all the Kuchkinchids and Suytnchids, while only Din Muhammad
of Balkh and Uzbeg Sultan responded to ‘Abdallah's appeals for help.
But to return to Shahr-i sabz. This town changed hands twice during the
following year. Khusrau Sultan soon retook it from Abt ’1 Khair, who fled back to
Samarqand, but Abu ’! Khair returned in Rajab/January 1568 with an army led by no
fewer than nineteen Princes from Samarqand, Tashkent, Farghana and Hisar,
including the erstwhile ruler of Samargand, Gadai Sultan, as well as Sultan Sa‘id and
Baba Sultan who had regrouped and altered their plans on hearing of ‘Abdallah's
return to Bukhara. Undaunted by their numbers and confident that he could defend
the town with the help of the reinforcements sent by ‘Abdallah, Khusrau Sultan came
out to fight. However, after a fierce battle he was captured outside the town and
straightaway put to death by order of Baba Sultan.
This was an escalation of the hostilities which required an energetic response, but
before undertaking a campaign against the rebel Princes it was essential to avenge

Khusrau and recover Shahr-i sabz. ‘Abdallah marched in the direction of this town
but was unable to make contact with the enemy for they fled in the direction of
Miyankal, leaving a certain Fakir Sultan of Hisar in charge of Shahr-i sabz. Miyankal
being particularly dear to him as the heart of his family's appanage ‘Abdallah had no
19 Fad] Allah, pass. Velyaminov-Zernov, Izsledovaniya, II, 150, 224, 272-3.
20 Hafiz Tanish, 145a.
21 Suitanov, Kochevye plemena, 112, places his death in 944/1537-8. Istoriya Kazakhskoi SSR,
272, give a similar date (1538). Bartol'd, Sochineniya, VIII, 380, places Buidash's death in 155960, but this seems to be erroneous. According to Hasan-i Rumld, 510, Haqq Nazar Khan, Buidash
Khan's successor, was certainly active by 1556, when he attacked Tashkent shortly after Nauruz
Ahmad's death.

7D)

Iskandar's reign

option but to follow his foe and to abandon his plan to retake Shahr-i sabz, detailing
Uzbeg Sultan to defend Bukhara. In the circumstances the Kichkinchid and other
Princes thought it best to desist from their planned conquest of Miyankal. They fled to
their respective seats and ‘Abdallah returned to Bukhara where he celebrated the birth

of his son, ‘Abd al-Mu’min, after giving orders for the town walls of Dabusi, a major
fortress in Miyankal, situated about half-way between Samargand and Bukhara, to be
repaired and strengthened.?2
The second round in ‘Abdallah's conflict with Kichkunchids and Suyunchids
took place a year later. It began in Dhi ”] qa‘da 976/April 1569 when he marched on
Shahr-i sabz, which he retook without difficulty, the garrison having fled to Hisar on
hearing of his approach. Then he appointed his cousin Uzbeg Sultan to govern both
Shahr-i sabz and Qarshi and prepared to leave the area. From Hafiz Tanish's rather
contradictory accounts of ‘Abdallah's intentions at that stage, it seems that he wanted
to make a show of strength either in Tashkent, Turkestan or Khujand, but he meant to

go to Bukhara first in order to finalise his plans. Just then, however, he was told that
Miyankal had been raided and pillaged by Jawanmard ‘Ali's brother Khudai Birdi.”3
This Prince seemed determined to disrupt the peace of the khanate, in retaliation for
his loss of Qarshi in 1568. ‘Abdallah was furious. He would teach the Kuchkunchids
not to terrorize the country and not to attack his family holdings in Miyankal.
He hurried to Samarqand which he approached from the north-east. Some
distance outside the town a major battle was fought in which all the Kuchkunchid
Princes, including Sultan Sa‘id, Jawanmard ‘Ali and Khudai Birdi, took part.
“Abdallah's side, however, carried the day and the Princes took to flight. Khudai
Birdi and his son were captured as they fled, together with many of Sultan Sa‘id's
amirs, and when they were taken to ‘Abdallah without further ado he had them all put
to death. He then besieged and took Samarqand, but left a few days later without
attempting to appoint a governor from among his amirs, for he had no wish to oust
the Kuchkunchids, or any other Princes from their long-held appanages. He only
wanted to defend the parts of the khanate which he had acquired for himself and for
his immediate family. He thought that the Kachkinchids had been taught a lesson and
that they would not cross him again in the future.
His optimism soon proved to be unfounded. As soon as ‘Abdallah left the area
Sultan Sa ‘id returned to Samarqand. Shortly afterwards he was joined by Baba Sultan
and together they tried to take Dabusi from ‘Abdallah's uncle Sulaiman. Sulaiman
Sultan and his son Mahmid, however, stood firm. After receiving reinforcements
from ‘Abdallah they came out and attacked with such vigour, killing one of Baba
Sultan's most faithful retainers, that the allies gave up their undertaking and returned
to Samarqand. Baba Sultan even thought it wise at this stage to try and patch up
relations with ‘Abdallah. He wrote to him, offering peace in return for the grant of
Shahr-i sabz. Although less than six months had gone by since ‘Abdallah had
recovered this town, he agreed to Baba Sultan's request in about September 1569,
hoping that his generosity would secure Baba Sultan's allegiance, while driving a

wedge between this Prince and the Kichkinchids.24 But Baba Sultan did not want

22 Hafiz Tanish, 72a-78a.
23 The word ‘Miyankal’ which appears in D88 is omitted at this stage in BL Or 3497, although
mentioned in connection with “Abdallah's first response to the news.

24 Thid., 79a-83b.

1561-83

Shahr-i sabz for himself. He wanted it in order to cement his alliance with the
Kuchkunchids and gave it at once to Jawanmard‘Ali's son Aba ’l-Khair, who was

also the late Khudai Birdi's nephew, and returned to Turkestan.25

‘Abdallah's grant of Shahr-i sabz to Baba Sultan only secured him a few months'
respite. Although it enabled him to make an - unsuccessful - attempt to take
Samargand, it can scarcely have pleased Uzbeg Sultan, who had been removed from
his post as governor after only five months. It was perhaps in order to placate him
that “Abdallah therefore permitted, or indeed encouraged his cousin to undertake a
campaign into Khurasan which would greatly increase Uzbeg Sultan's prestige. This
campaign appears to have been conceived as a diversion which would keep at least
some of the Iranian troops occupied in the east while the Ottomans were attacking
Astrakhan in support of Bukharan travellers and pilgrims. It is not clear whether the
two campaigns coincided, but whether Uzbeg Sultan's campaign was timed correctly
or not, Selim II must have been gratified that it should have been undertaken at all,

and that “Abdallah should have spared some 10,000 men at a time when he was
fighting to establish his authority in the khanate. He would have been even happier to
know of the success of the campaign, during which Uzbeg Sultan got to Jam, south
of Mashhad, taking much booty, and killing some 1,000 Iranians on his way back.26
The Ottoman expedition, on the other hand, was a total disaster. Three exhausting and

useless months were spent trying to reach Astrakhan overland, followed by a little
less than a month of sporadic fighting in cold weather, with insufficient provisions.2’
Nothing had been achieved and many lives had been lost when in late September
1569 the decision was taken to withdraw. However, although the Ottomans had failed
to conquer Astrakhan, the very fact that they undertook this campaign after protesting
against the plight of Bukharans in Muscovy, was bound to benefit the merchants,
pilgrims and ambassadors of the khanate in the long run.
Meanwhile the peace which ‘Abdallah had bought by surrendering Shahr-i sabz to
Baba Sultan was broken early in 1570. When Baba Sultan came back to the attack, he
was accompanied not only by Sultan Sa‘id, but also by a number of Khwarazmian
Princes. This proved to be the first of many instances in which the Khwarazmians
interfered in disputes within the khanate. The allies marched first against Karmina,
where they were met with stiff resistance, then they attacked and robbed the people
who had sought refuge by the tomb of a holy man in Ghujduwan, not far from

Bukhara.78
With this campaign the conflict with Sultan Sa‘id and Baba Sultan had entered a
new and more dangerous phase. An all-out effort would clearly be needed to bring it
to a final conclusion. ‘Abdallah would have to be sure of his forces. He decided
therefore to bring some order to the Janibegid camp. In particular he would chastise
Din Muhammad of Balkh who had become arrogant and who had been reluctant to
provide ‘Abdallah with soldiers when required, perhaps because he thought that his
help in the Shahr-i sabz campaign had not been suitably recognised. Uzbeg Sultan,
who had just returned from Khurasan, was summoned to help in 978/after June
1570, but after taking Shiburghan for ‘Abdallah, he went over to Din Muhammad.

25 Tbid., 83b.
26 Ibid., 83b-84a. Hasan-i Rimld, 444-5, dates the campaign 977 (between late June 1569 and May

1570). Iskandar Beg, 94.
27 See further about this in Bennigsen, 439-40.

28 Hafiz Tanish, 84a-b.

Iskandar's reign

This was serious, for it showed that rebellion was spreading even among ‘Abdallah's
closest relatives. Undaunted, ‘Abdallah continued towards Balkh and secured Din

Muhammad's submission, but he no longer felt able to trust him.?? He decided to

remove the town of Tirmidh from his cousin's control, for it was strategically placed
on the main ford of the Amu-Darya. First, however, ‘Abdallah had to prevent him

from getting foreign support for his subversive plans, and this meant establishing
friendly relations with Akbar who might be tempted to intervene on Din Muhammad's
behalf in order to further his own ambitious plans over the khanate.
‘Abdallah consequently despatched two friendly embassies to Akbar in quick
succession. The first ambassador, Hajji IItamish, who reached India in March 1572,
was well received and was sent back with gifts. However, he was not given a letter
stating the Emperor's good intentions towards Iskandar and his son. It was
imperative to secure a more positive response, as this would commit Akbar not to
intervene in the khanate, even if he should be asked to do so by Iran. In any case, the
presence in India of an ambassador from the khanate would certainly deter Akbar
from contemplating an invasion and thus give ‘Abdallah time to deal with Din
Muhammad. A second ambassador was accordingly sent off. He arrived in India in
August 1572, but was only received in May 1573, Akbar having set off on campaign

to Gujarat shortly after his arrival.3° In the meantime,

‘Abdallah forced Din

Muhammad to surrender Tirmidh in April 1572, and, once again, to pledge his
submission. But it was soon clear that this submission was not genuine, for a month

later, when Baba Sultan took advantage of the death of his ally Sultan Sa‘id to
threaten Samarqand and Shahr-i sabz, Din Muhammad failed again to provide his
suzerain with soldiers.3! His behaviour was totally unacceptable: he ignored orders,
harassed his amirs and allegedly spent more time womanising and drinking (a
serious, but standard charge proferred by the amirs themselves), than attending to the
defence of the province. On hearing this ‘Abdallah made up his mind: he would
remove his cousin from Balkh and annex the province. The appanage system,
inherited from Genghis Khan, had outlived its use if it enabled the sultans to defy the
khagan and his representative.
In early November 1572, after crushing Baba Sultan's troops with the help of
Jawanmard ‘Ali and his son Abi ’1-Khair, ‘Abdallah gathered an army and marched
on Balkh.32 The siege was a long drawn-out affair, in the course of which both sides
received foreign help. The ruler of Khwarazm, Hajjim Khan, sent a contingent under
his son, Suyunch Muhammad, to help ‘Abdallah, probably hoping that this would
make ‘Abdallah forget his kinsmen's assistance to Baba Sultan two years earlier. Din
Muhammad, on the other hand, received support from Mirza Sulaiman of
Badakhshan and from Hashim Sultan, governor of Hisar, a very distant relative who
had traditionally supported the Suyinchids. They marched to Khulm, ravaged the
area between Khulm and Balkh, and the countryside between Balkh and Tirmidh,

seizing all available cattle and sheep.33
29 Thid., 84b-87a.
30 Aba ’]-Fadl, Akbarnama, Il, 368; II, 211. See further in Burton, Bukharans in trade, 186-7
n.11.

31 Hafiz Tanish, 87a-89b, 90b, 95b.
32 Thid., 96a.
33 Tbid., 101a, 103a-b. Hafiz-i Tanish, I, 75-76, 156, 164; II, 153. Hashim Sultan's father was

Burunduk Sultan who shared a great-great-grandfather with Muhammad Shaibani and like him

1561-83
But their action did not save Balkh, nor did it deprive “Abdallah's army of

provisions, for he sent a detachment against them which forced them to flee, leaving
behind their booty. The siege lasted nine months and it ended in July 1573 with Din
Muhammad's surrender. ‘Abdallah formally annexed Balkh, appointing his trusted
ataliq, Nazar Bi Naiman, as governor. Then, after making further appointments to all
the major towns in the area and sending Din Muhammad to Ma wara’ al-nahr proper,

“Abdallah returned to Bukhara.*4

His decisive action had certainly impressed the other Abilkhairids, for the holders
of Samargand, Tashkent and Andijan all hastened to send their congratulations. There

was even a propitiating message from Badakhshan.35 ‘Abdallah was obviously on the
right path and must continue on it if he wanted to impose his authority on the khanate.
Although there is no indication that he consulted his father, or even Khwajah Sa‘d
before deciding to seize Balkh, they too must have approved of his action. The
khwajah, who had a passion for acquiring property, would have been particularly
delighted with “Abdallah's success, because each conquest was followed by a gift of
land from his murid, which often included a magnificent garden and irrigation

rights.36
The following year a Muscovite ambassador, Zakharii Bogdanov, arrived in
Bukhara, together with a trade mission sent by the Stroganov brothers, the powerful
merchants and salt industrialists who were sponsoring the Russian advance into
Siberia. This was most gratifying, for it meant that Ivan IV and his merchants were
keen to renew their contacts with Bukhara, which had been interrupted ever since the

Bukharan mission of 1568-9 was detained in Muscovy.37 Encouraged by this, and by
the embassies received when he took Balkh, ‘Abdallah decided to chastise the
governor of Hisar, Hashim Sultan, for supporting Din Muhammad, both before and
since the fall of Balkh. He gathered a large army at Qarshi and marched towards
Hisar, ignoring Hashim Sultan's last-minute offer of submission. When he reached
this town at the beginning of Safar 982/23 May 1574 many of the rebels fled to
Badakhshan and the siege began. Hisar fell after five and a half weeks. In order to
discourage further rebellions ‘Abdallah decided, once again, against clemency. Like
the Kichkinchid Prince Khudai Birdi in 1569, Hashim Sultan was therefore put to
death. But Din Muhammad's erstwhile supporter, Uzbeg Sultan, was merely
removed from nearby Shiburghan to Hisar, in order to make it more difficult for him
to help Din Muhammad if he should try and regain Balkh.78
‘Abdallah's expedition to Hisar and the execution of Hashim Sultan appeared to
have had the desired effect, as all was quiet in the khanate for a few months. But in
late 982/early 1575 he was informed by Jawanmard “Ali that Baba Sultan, ‘governor

traced his ancestry back to Jichi, son of Genghis Khan.

34 Thid., 104a-5b.
35 Tbid., 106a.
36 Yuldashev, “Novye dannye”, 41. Abduraimov, Ocherki, II, 79. He was given land in Karmina and
Marw in 1570 and 1571-2.
37 Vvedenskii, Torgovyi dom, 94-95. See above for the detention of these ambassadors and the

Ottomans’ intervention on their behalf.

38 Hafiz Tanish, 106a-8a. Although Uzbeg Sultan had not supported Din Muhammad during the
siege of Balkh, he had withheld his help from ‘Abdallah and ignored orders to hand over
Shiburghan to ‘Abdallah's new appointee.

Iskandar's reign

of Turkestan’, had gathered a large army and was preparing to march against
Samargand, together with his brother Darwish Sultan, governor of Tashkent, who
had so far remained loyal to Iskandar. ‘Abdallah set off to repel this threat to the
khanate, joining forces on the way with Jawanmard ‘Ali and his son Abu ’1-Khair,
but by the time the two armies met near the Syr-Darya, Jawanmard ‘Ali had turned
against him and given his support to Baba Sultan. Although “Abdallah had been
relying on him, he had little difficulty in crushing Baba Sultan's forces. He then
returned to Bukhara without attempting to punish Jawanmard ‘Ali, hoping perhaps
that the Prince would resume his earlier allegiance to Iskandar in view of Baba

Sultan's defeat.3?
It was at about this time that ‘Abdallah sent an embassy to Turkey. Although the
letter which his ambassador, ‘Ali Bahadur Hajji, took to the Sultan, has not survived,
‘Abdallah appears to have announced that he was in control of the khanate, having
annexed Balkh and Hisar, and also repelled an attack from Baba Sultan. He may also
have mentioned that he intended to march, as soon as possible, into Khurasan to deal
with the Shi‘a enemy and no doubt he congratulated the new Sultan, Murad III, on
his accession. Murad III was well pleased with ‘Abdallah's letter. In his reply, which
was written between April 1576 and April-1577,4° he praised the ambassador's
eloquence. He went on to express the hope that the Shi‘a, whose ways were
characterized by ‘evil and oppression’, would be scattered and ‘trampled in the field’.
He also made much of their common friendship, which he said would further the
cause of Islam, a hint that they should act together against the Shi‘a and other enemies

of Islam.*!
During 1576, knowing that it would take Baba Sultan some time to re-form his

army and to threaten him again, ‘Abdallah marched against Khwarazm.*? The reason
for this campaign is not known. Did he still bear a grudge against the Khwarazmian
Princes for the help given to Baba Sultan in 1570? Or could it be that his recent guest,
the Muscovite envoy Zakharii Bogdanov, had been delayed, badly treated or even
attacked in Khwarazm on his way to or from Ma wara’ al-nahr? Such an attack may
well have taken place, for the Princes of Khwarazm, who were just as anxious as
“Abdallah to establish solid trade links with Muscovy, must have resented the fact that
no envoy was sent to Hajjim Khan, although he had sent four embassies to Ivan the
Terrible, or one more than ‘Abdallah. In any case, there was much deep-seated
hostility in Khwarazm towards the people of the khanate. They remembered the
invasion and conquest of their country by Muhammad Shaibani, and later by
‘Ubaidallah. They also envied the richer and more productive country which, due to
its position on the trade routes to India and China, was able to offer a much wider
range of exotic goods to Muscovite buyers. It was tempting therefore to disrupt
Bukharo-Muscovite relations by attacking travellers who passed throught Khwarazm
39 Thid., 108b-110a.
40 These dates correspond to the tenure of office of the Sultan's secretary, Mu‘azzim Zadeh, who
wrote the letter.

41 Faridin Beg, Il, 235.
42 Badr al-Din, 223b, gives no reasons for the campaign which he dates 984, i.e. some time between
31 March 1576 and 21 March 1577. Istoriya narodov, 67, dates the expedition 1575, and says
‘Abdallah conquered the whole country, while Hajjim Muhammad fled. Veselovskii, Ocherk, 123,

places the expedition either in 983/1575-6 or 984/1576-7. Abu ’1-Ghazi (as below) does not date
the campaign. He only says it was undertaken while Hajjim Khan was in Khwarazm.

1561-83

on their way to and from the khanate.
Whatever the reason for ‘Abdallah's attack, it was carried out while Hajjim Khan
was away in Khurasan. ‘Abdallah took Hazarasp and Khangah (Khanqah), then
made for Khiva where Hajjim Khan's brothers, Timir and Pulad, had sought refuge
and were preparing for a siege. On the way there, however, he was told that Hajjim
Khan had received his brothers' appeals for help and was hurrying back, having
already left Nesa. Since he had taught the Khwarazmian Princes a lesson, and since
Hajjim Khan's brothers sent him gifts and apparently offered to recognise his father
as. suzerain, ‘Abdallah decided to make peace with them, and he returned to the

khanate.* It is not known what demands he may have made before leaving the
country, but peace prevailed between the two countries and in autumn 1577 the
Khwarazmian Prince Abl (Aba ’1) Muhammad of Nesa and Abiward, who was
“Abdallah's brother-in-law, came over for the circumcision of ‘Abdallah's son ‘Abd

al-Mu’ min.“
Meanwhile, in May 1576 the energetic ruler of Iran, Shah Tahmasp, had been
assassinated and as a result the country sank into a state of chaos from which the
accession in August of his son, Isma‘il II, did not save it.4> This seemed an ideal time
for ‘Abdallah to gain fame and renown at the expense of Iran. He hastened to write to
Akbar suggesting a holy war and a partition of the country. He knew that Akbar was
anxious to retake Qandahar from Iran, and hoped that by helping him in his
endeavour he might gain the Emperor's gratitude and friendship. Although satisfied
with Akbar's attitude so far - for not only had he acknowledged the second embassy
from the khanate with a letter, but he had made no attempt to intervene in the Balkh
campaign - ‘Abdallah was concerned that the Emperor might be thinking of
intervening in Badakhshan. He knew that Mirza Sulaiman had recently visited the
Mughal Court, asking for help against his own grandson, Mirza Shahrukh, son of the
late Mirza Ibrahim, who had appropriated part of Badakhshan.4° A Mughal campaign
into Badakhshan would be dangerous, whichever of the mirzas Akbar chose to
support, as the province was close to Balkh, and the Mughal forces might be tempted,
while in the vicinity, to make a bid for the khanate. ‘Abdallah was not happy, either,
with Uzbeg Sultan's attitude, for, in his new capacity as governor of Hisar, he had
taken upon himself to mediate between the mirzas, and it was quite possible that he
might be considering an alliance with them, or even with Akbar.47
By the time ‘Abdallah's ambassador, ‘Abd al-Rahim, arrived at the Mughal Court
in 1577,48 a rebellion had flared up in newly-conquered Gujarat, and Akbar was
determined to put it down. He was therefore unable to contemplate foreign adventures
and declined ‘Abdallah's suggestion. The tone of his answering letter, if one is to
believe Akbar's sycophantic biographer, Abu ’1-Fadl, was as righteous as it was

43 Abii ’1-Ghazi, tr. 273-4, text 255-6.
44 Hafiz Tanish, 110b, 158b. Abi 1 Muhammad's amirs are said to have disapproved of his visit
because, by accepting ‘Abdallah's invitation, he appeared to be obeying the request of a suzerain.

Hafiz-i Tanish, 280 n.339. Salahetdinova equates the month of mizan (Libra) with the seventh
month of the Iranian calendar, i.e., September-October.

45 C.H.Iran, VI, 248, 251, 253.
46 Abi |-Fadl, Akbarndma, III, 153-7, 162, 163. In fact Mirza Sulaiman had left Mughal India for

the Hijaz in December 1575 empty-handed.

47 Noér, Il, 121-2.
48 Aba ’1-Fadl, Akbarnama, Ill, 211. Nizamutdinov, Sredneaziatsko-indiiskie otnosheniya, 55.
e4|

Iskandar's reign

crushingly dismissive. He pointed out that the ruler of Iran descended from the
Prophet, that mere differences of law and religious practice could not serve as a
ground for conquest, and that he was bound by the ancient and valued friendship
which had existed between his ancestors and the Safawids. Finally, he rebuked

‘Abdallah for mentioning a descendant of the Prophet in less than respectful terms.49
If such an admonition was indeed delivered by Akbar's ambassador, Mirza Fulad, it
cannot have pleased ‘Abdallah, although the fact that an ambassador was sent to the
khanate with this letter, together with some rare gifts from India, was most gratifying.
It was a clear indication that Akbar considered him as a Prince of some standing,

whose suggestions were worthy of consideration and reply.
While ‘Abd al-Rahim was in India ‘Abdallah seriously thought of invading
Badakhshan. He wanted to chastise Shahrukh for what ‘Abdallah's biographer calls
‘the impurity of his faith’ and for ‘raising his head from the collar of subjection’, i.e.,
presumably for his Shi’a tendencies and his obvious hostility. It was essential to warn
the young man that no attack on the khanate, akin to the one carried out by Mirza
Sulaiman in 1573, would be tolerated. ‘Abdallah was in fact ready to march from
Balkh when an embassy from Shahrukh reached him in Spring 986/1578, bringing
apologies, protestations of friendship and a rich robe. It would have been ungracious
to ignore the proferred olive branch and, since ‘Abdallah had just heard of a major
rebellion in the north-eastern parts of the khanate, he decided to give Shahrukh a
chance to prove his sincerity. He cancelled the expedition and accepted Shahrukh's
apologies, hoping that peaceful neighbourly relations would ensue.>°
The north-eastern rebellion had been triggered off by the recent visit to Tashkent
of Jawanmard ‘Ali and his son Muzaffar. The rebels included Jawanmard, Muzaffar,
the Suyiinchids of Tashkent and Turkestan, and the rulers of Khujand, Andijan and

Akhsiket in Farghana. At the outbreak of the rebellion Jawanmard ‘Ali's son Aba ’1Khair, who had remained loyal, tried to retain Samarqand for ‘Abdallah, but after an
initial victory against the troops from Turkestan he was defeated by his father's army.
However, he managed to get away and wrote to ‘Abdallah appealing for help.
‘Abdallah lost no time in responding to his plea. Leaving Balkh in Muharram
986/March-April 1578, he led his army to Qarshi, then, after securing the approval of
his spiritual director Khwajah Sa‘d, he marched to Samarqand. Joining forces with
his brothers, Dustim and ‘Ibadallah, and also with Abi ’1-Khair whom he met on the
way, he arrived outside Samarqand on 11 April and at once began the siege.
Jawanmard ‘Ali and his other sons defended the town and they also had the help of a
large rebel army under Baba Sultan which attacked ‘Abdallah in the rear. However,
after several hard fought battles Baba Sultan was defeated and ‘Abdallah took the
town circa 14 June 1578. ‘Abdallah behaved with commendable magnanimity as a
victor. He merely placed Jawanmard ‘Ali and his generals under arrest, and he even
went so far as to reward Muzaffar Sultan who had taken a major part in the rebellion,
because he changed sides before the end of the siege. Then he granted Aba ’1-Khair
Samargqand and its appurtenances and left in the direction of Zamin which Baba Sultan

was approaching with fresh troops.5!
‘Abdallah did not hurry, however, because he was waiting for reinforcements.
49 Abii ’I-Fadl, Akbarndma, Il, 211-2.
50 Hafiz Tanish, 112b-3a.
51 Hafiz Tanish, 113a-8a.

1561-83
While he was waiting he received Akbar's first envoy, Mirza Fulad, in audience. He

also sent his men to fight the enemy's scouts. When, after a fierce battle and initial
losses ‘Abdallah's side won the day, a friendly message was received from Baba
Sultan's brother Distim, which ‘Abdallah chose to ignore. On 31 July Uzbeg Sultan
at last arrived at “Abdallah's camp with reinforcements. Four days later, with an
enlarged army of 30,000 men ‘Abdallah resumed his march towards Zamin, only to
be told that the town had already fallen to Baba Sultan. Undaunted he made his way
there at night, carefully prepared his positions on the battle field and the following day
he attacked the enemy's camp with such vigour, making full use of small cannon of
the zamburak variety, that he won the day and Baba Sultan fled towards Tashkent.
One of the many prisoners taken was Din Muhammad of Balkh who had joined Baba
Sultan on returning from pilgrimage in Mecca and who was put in the care of
“Abdallah's brother-in-law, Jani Muhammad, at Chahar Jay on the Oxus. There was
much rich booty for “Abdallah's troops, but they were forbidden to attack Baba
Sultan's soldiers, who were allowed to leave unharmed.

‘Abdallah did not want to

increase the number of his enemies, and no doubt his forbearance made a good
impression on Akbar's ambassador.52
‘Abdallah then set off in pursuit of Baba Sultan, only to find that his enemy had
fled again, this time to the Noghays. The feud with Baba Sultan was getting more
dangerous, for he was gradually drawing into it most of the neighbouring nomads.
The Noghays or Mangits were Turkic-speaking nomads who, like the Uzbegs of Ma

wara‘ al-nahr and the Qazags, claimed descent from Genghis Khan's son Jachi.>3
They were divided into three Hordes, which camped in strictly different locations and
were at loggerheads with each other. The Shikhmamaev (Shaikh Mamai) camped in
Siberia. The Kaziev/Little Horde camped in the northern Caucasus. And those whom
Muscovite sources called Shiidyak or Great Horde moved between the Caspian in
winter and the lower reaches of the Volga in summer. They had a particularly strong
presence in, and around, the town of Saraichik on the Ural river, on a major route

between Bukhara and Muscovy.” In the past the Noghays had accepted the authority
of ‘Abdallah's ancestor, Abi ’l-Khair. They had also supported Muhammad
Shaibani, but ever since then these fierce nomads, who lived on their saddles and
who, like the Qazaqs, dressed in animal skins, had looked upon the inhabitants of the

khanate with contempt as comfort-loving sedentaries.
Baba Sultan's flight prevented ‘Abdallah from dealing with him decisively.
However, he made use of his stay east of the Syr-Darya to try and strengthen his
links with the other Suyanchids. Here, as in Samargand, ‘Abdallah wanted the local
representatives of the Abulkhairid family to continue to rule their traditional appanages
independently, provided that he could rely on peace within the khanate and on military
support for his wars. It had not been his wish to annex their appanages. That is why,
although Darwish Sultan had supported his brother Baba Sultan against him in 1572
and 1575, ‘Abdallah confirmed him as ruler of his family's appanage of Tashkent as
soon as he came over from Turkestan to pay homage. Similarly, when Darwish
Sultan's nephew, ‘Abd al-Karim, came out of Sairam to meet him, ‘Abdallah
accepted his offerings and formally confirmed the young man as governor of the

52 Ibid., 118a-121b.
53 Lane-Poole, Muslim Dynasties, 240. Fadi Allah, 62.

54 Geraklitov, 104, 106. Howorth, II, ii, 1040-2, 1050-1.

Iskandar's reign

town. Next ‘Abdallah marched north to Sighnaq to make it clear that the area was
under his general control as the khaqan's representative.>>
Then he returned to Bukhara. At this stage he was no doubt disappointed to hear
that Aba ’I-Khair, to whom he had given Samarqand as a reward for his loyalty, had
turned against him and was attacking Bukhara. This was an unacceptable example of
Kichkinchid perfidy. Sending his brother ‘Ibadallah to deal with the traitor,
‘Abdallah ordered him to show no mercy. ‘Ibadallah did as instructed and after Abu
’|-Khair was captured he had him put to death on 9 Sha‘ban/11 November 1578.
When ‘Abdallah entered Samarqand shortly afterwards he put an end formally to
Kichkanchid supremacy in this town by appointing his brother ‘Tbadallah to rule over
the town.56 He also decided to make a first move towards curtailing the power of the
Suyanchids. He would annex the town of Andijan which was traditionally considered
as part of the appurtenances of Tashkent. He therefore appointed a nephew of Baba
Sultan's, Muhammad Mu’min, governor of Andijan and sent him there, under the
tutelage of one of his trusted amirs, ‘Abd al-Samad Bi. These were major
developments which were bound to have impressed the Mughal ambassador, Mirza
Falad, if he was still in the khanate.

The date of Mirza Fulad's departure for India is not known, but he cannot have
left much after ‘Abdallah's return to Bukhara on 20th November, for he was sent
again to the khanate, this time in the company of a certain Khwajah Khatib, in
987/March 1579-February 1580.57 Mirza Fulad's account of the campaign against
Zamin and Tashkent, the elimination of Abt ’1-Khair, and the visit of an ambassador
from faraway Muscovy, Yurii Matyunin, in 1578, must have enhanced ‘Abdallah's
standing in the Emperor's eyes. This probably accounts for the more conciliatory tone
of Akbar's answer to a fresh message from the khanate in which “Abdallah once again
suggested joint action against Iran in order to clear the route to the Holy Places.
Although Akbar refused once again-to act upon this suggestion, he took the
trouble to explain that, since his conquest of Gujarat in 1572, pilgrims from India and
the khanate had in fact chosen this route in preference to the route through Iran, as
being both convenient and safe. ‘Abdallah's reminder that the Mughals had lost
Qandahar to Iran prompted a tart rejoinder about similar losses of patrimony by the
Abilkhairids. But the sharpness of this rejoinder was softened when Akbar added
that no complaints had been made against the Iranian authorities of Qandahar by either
travellers or pilgrims, and that, if it ever became necessary to do so, he could easily
retake the town. Posing as the protector of Shah Tahmasp's orphaned children, Akbar
went on to rebuke “Abdallah, as before, for writing disrespectfully about a descendant
of the Prophet. This rebuke, however, was not a mark of hostility. On the contrary,
by showing concern for the descendant of the Prophet and by appending a long list of
countries and provinces which he had conquered for Islam from the ‘enemies of
religion’ and the ‘countries of the Kafirs’, Akbar wanted to convince the devout
Transoxianan of the strength of his own commitment to Islam. Although he was then
trying to evolve a spiritually satisfying religion by listening to Christian, Hindu,
Zoroastrian, Jain and Sabaean exponents of religion, Akbar was still very keen to be

55 Hafiz Tanish, 121b-2b.
56 Thid., 122b-3a.
57 Ibid., 122b-3b. Aba ’1-Qadir, II, 270. This second embassy is not mentioned by Abi ’1-Fadl, and

is therefore ignored by Antonova, Varma and Nizamutdinov.

1561-83

considered a devout Muslim.>® To make this clear his letter bore a carefully-devised
seal. The seal incorporated a message which assured ‘Abdallah of Akbar's friendship
and which could also be taken as a condemnation of the Shi‘a heresy. It read as
follows: “When we are friends with each other, sea and land are free from confusion

and evil’.59

But to return to events in the khanate. In December 1578 it seemed at last as if
‘Abdallah's feud with Baba Sultan might be over, for the Suyanchid wrote to ask
forgiveness for his rebellion. ‘Abdallah hastened to grant his forgiveness and to
confirm Baba Sultan as governor of Turkestan on condition that he would in future
take orders from his brother, Darwish Sultan, who was governor of Tashkent. But
Baba Sultan's repentance was not genuine. Less than two months later he attacked
Tashkent and killed several major officials there. When ‘Abdallah was told about this
and heard that Darwish Sultan had also been killed in unclear circumstances, he gave
orders for a large army to be gathered.
The campaign of 1579 was to be a little shorter than that of 1578, but it would be
extremely complicated, for ‘Abdallah would be faced with successive attacks on all
fronts by the various Kichkinchid and Suyinchid princes. ‘Abdallah began by
marching against Andijan, where the amir ‘Abd al-Samad Bi was, not surprisingly,
under siege, as the Suyunchid Princes were not prepared to accept him as ‘Abdallah's
representative in the town. He set off from Qarshi in March 1579 and the first part of
the campaign was marked by two successful engagements, the capture of a large
amount of the rebels’ military equipment, including 10,000 spears or javelins (nizah)

and 1,000 coats of mail, and the defeat of the rebels at Andijan.©°
On the way to Andijan ‘Abdallah received an envoy from Istanbul, possibly sent
to inform him that the Ottomans were planning to attack Iran in 1580 and to suggest
that he attack simultaneously from the east. “Abdallah doubtless made sure that Murad
III was told about his recent success and about the enormous amount of booty taken,
but whether or not he promised to attack Khurasan, he does not seem to have sent a

return embassy to the Sultan.®!
After his success at Andijan ‘Abdallah sent out various Princes to try and discover
Baba Sultan's whereabouts. He himself marched north-north-west towards the
Qipchagq steppes, passing Sairam on his way, in order to impress the local inhabitants
with his might. Early in May 1579 he heard rumours of an agreement between Baba

Sultan and the Qazaqs. He made enquiries and found that the wife of one of the
Suyinchid Princes had been appropriated by a Qazaq Prince, who had married her.
This had surprisingly led the redundant husband, ‘Abd al-Karim, and his brother,
Khwarazmshah, to consider themselves related to the Qazaqs and consequently to

refuse to regard them as enemies.® This was ominous news, for the Qazaqs were
then camping by the river Talas, from whence they might easily launch an attack on
‘Abdallah and on the towns of the Syr-Darya. However, ‘Adallah continued towards
Sairam and, perhaps because they were uneasy at his approach and feared an armed

58 Bhagchand, 196b-199a.
59 Aba ’1-Qadir, II, 267, 270; tr. II, 278. Khwajah Nizam, II, 344.
60 Hafiz Tanish, 124b-133b. Salahetdinova (Hafiz-i Tanish, Il, 253), translates nizah as shirt of
mail. In her manuscript the number of nizah is given as 2,000.
61 Thid., 129b. Savory, History, 385. The Ottomans attacked Shirwan in 988/1580-1.

62 Hafiz Tanish, 135b.
31

Iskandar's reign

Suyinchids. They sent an envoy who met ‘Abdallah en route for Sairam and
delivered their protestations of love and friendship. The Qazaqs also offered to
honour their existing alliance with the khanate by surrendering a son of Baba
Sultan's, together with several of Baba Sultan's officials and amirs whom they had
recently captured. They added that ‘Abdallah was merely to let them know if he
wanted the captives alive or dead. ‘Abdallah was very pleased with their offer. He
rewarded their envoy generously and sent one of his ataligs to announce that he
would give them four villages in the Turkestan vilayet, in return for their complete
obedience and for their delivery, as soon as possible, of the captives they had

promised.®?
This exchange of embassies augured well for the second part of the campaign, but
in May, shortly after his envoy had left for the Qazaq encampment, ‘Abdallah heard
that the Kichkinchids and Suyinchids were carrying out attacks on Pskent,
Shahrukhiya and Zamin, some

distance to the south-east and south-west of his

position. Detaching some of his troops to deal with them, he continued northwards,
much to the alarm of the Qazags who hastened to send him their second message of
friendship in two weeks. However, they appear to have considered his proposed gift
inadequate, and to have resented his demand for total obedience. They dragged their
feet about delivering the captives and conveniently forgot their promise after

‘Abdallah went south.®4
‘Abdallah was obliged to do so just over a week later, when he heard on 2 June
that the Kichkinchids had united under Buzah Khwar and had launched a major
attack on Samarqand. Marching at speed past Tashkent, he sent orders for his brother
and various amirs to converge upon Samarqand. Buzah Khwar tried to evade their
combined forces but was pursued, compelled to give battle and eventually put to
flight. ‘Abdallah then marched eastwards to Ura Tipa, where the Kichkinchids had
re-formed and were causing havoc, but he left his brother, ‘Ibadallah, in Samarqand

to protect the vilayet against further attack.®
Straight after the battle of Samarqand ‘Abdallah was told that Mirza Shahrukh of
Badakhshan had attacked Balkh on 7th June with the support of a Kiachkinchid
prince and a Prince of Hisar. Although Shahrukh had been defeated and had suffered
many casualties, ‘Abdallah was furious. He determined to punish the mirza and
discourage any further foreign intervention in the khanate. But the 1579 campaign
against Baba Sultan was not over yet, so ‘Abdallah had to postpone his plans for a
punitive expedition. While he was marching to Ura Tipa, Baba Sultan had reappeared
on the scene and seized Tashkent. His fellow rebels were also keeping ‘Abdallah
occupied. But in July, after a major battle in which both sides used firearms,
‘Abdallah defeated the Kuchkunchids. They fled south-west across the Amu-Darya to
the province of Kuhistan controlled by Iran, with ‘Ibadallah in hot pursuit. Baba
Sultan had now lost his allies. Unwilling to face ‘Abdallah on his own, he sent to ask
for his forgiveness and once again ‘Abdallah thought it best to accept his submission.
He even allowed Baba Sultan to retain Tashkent, hoping that his generosity, coupled
with the defeat of all Baba Sultan's allies, would persuade the Suyinchid to put down
his arms at last and become reconciled to Iskandar's rule. However, it would have
63 Ibid., 136a.
64 Tbid., 136b.
65 Hafiz Tanish, 138b.

1561-83

been foolish to rely entirely on Baba Sultan's word; therefore, in confirmation of their
agreement, ‘Abdallah demanded Baba Sultan's wife and children as hostages, and
they were duly delivered to him.
The 1579 campaign was now truly over. Satisfied with his achievement,‘ Abdallah
went back to Bukhara by a very roundabout route, which took him first to Tashkent,
where he went hunting. He also celebrated his victory with several banquets, and
finally reached Bukhara in August. Among his companions were his faithful fosterbrother and amir Qu! Baba Kikeltash, his son and heir ‘Abd al-Mu’min, who at 11

had enjoyed his first taste of war during the battle of Andijan, and, last but not least,
Khwajah Sa‘d Jaibari.®
Just over two months later, in early November 1579, ‘Abdallah, who was
hunting near the Amu-Darya, received a letter from Baba Sultan. Once again the
Suyunchid said he repented for past offences. He also informed ‘Abdallah that the
Qazags had come to Tashkent and were demanding a big share of the province.
Explaining that he was not strong enough to repel them if they attacked, Baba Sultan
asked for guidance, and also to be made governor of Andijan. His requests angered
‘Abdallah as showing both cowardice and greed. He gave orders for Baba Sultan's
ambassador to be kept in Bukhara and for a messenger to be despatched, who would
signify his displeasure and give Baba Sultan the required instructions. But Baba
Sultan did not wait. Before the messenger reached Tashkent he gave the Qazaqs the
two major vilayets of Yassi/Turkestan and Sabran, together with the well-fortified
trade and agricultural centres of the same name. This was unnecessarily generous, as
well as difficult to excuse, even as a panic measure. In fact Baba Sultan's reason for
disposing of such a valuable part of the khanate without reference to the khaqan was
that he wanted to secure allies for a forthcoming attack on ‘Abdallah.
The Qazaq Princes, one of whom (Jalim Sultan) happened to be Baba Sultan's
father-in-law, were delighted with their success. It was agreed that they would cross
the Amu-Darya and attack the territory controlled by ‘Abdallah while the
Kichkinchid, Buzah Khwar, whom Baba Sultan had recently welcomed to
Tashkent, led his brothers in an attack on Samarqand.

‘Abdallah had not yet returned to Bukhara when he was informed of Baba
Sultan's treacherous agreement with the Qazaqs.°” He was angry and disappointed
but decided to hide his feelings and to try a new approach against his enemy. Divide
et impera, that was the solution to his problems! He would split the new alliance,

break the links between the Kichkinchids and Suyunchids, getting Baba Sultan
himself to help solve the Kichkinchid problem, and when Baba Sultan had lost all
his allies, then he would reduce him to impotence.
He therefore sent back Baba Sultan's ambassador with a letter in which he made
no reference to the Qazaqs. Referring only to the Suyunchid's expressed wish for
submission and forgiveness, he assured him that friendship between them was not
only possible, but would grow on a par with Baba Sultan's efforts to strengthen it.
He must give up rebellion altogether, seize the rebellious Samarqand Princes and
deliver them to Bukhara, but if this were not possible, he must at the very least refuse
them asylum in Tashkent. In token of his own goodwill, and much to the dismay of
his advisers, ‘Abdallah sent back Baba Sultan's daughter, who had been delivered to

66 Jhid., 138b-43a.
67 Thid., 144a. ‘Abdallah was then in Qarshi.

Iskandar's reign

him three months earlier as a guarantee of her father's submission. Such generosity
could, of course, be misunderstood and, fully aware that Baba Sultan might take it as
a sign of weakness and not as the olive branch which it was meant to be, ‘Abdallah
made it clear in a postciipt that he was in earnest, and that non-compliance with his

wishes would mean war.*®8

On receiving 'Abdallah's letter, Baba Sultan decided to dissemble. Although he
had no intention of giving up his alliance with the Kuchkunchids, he thought it safer
not to defy ‘Abdallah openly just then. He therefore held back the Kachkunchids and
let the Qazaqs attack alone. The first attack took place, as planned, in Ramadan
(between 20 October and 21 November 1579), for it was well known that a pious
Sunni such as ‘Abdallah would not take up arms during the month of the Fast, when
only hunting was considered permissible. The Qazaq Sarban Sultan raided a village
near Samarqand and took much booty before returning across the Syr-Darya. When
‘Abdallah, who was in Qarshi, was told of the raid on 30th November, he sent troops

to Samarqand and Karmina to forestall a second attack. But Sarban Sultan's second
raid was aimed instead at the outskirts of Bukhara, and he made off with more booty,

including all the cattle of the area.®?
‘Abdallah was indignant. He set off for Miyankal and made preparations for a
new campaign. While he was there he received another envoy from Baba Sultan who
brought a message of peace. ‘Abdallah ignored this as a mere ploy, and in fact soon
afterwards he heard from ‘Ibadallah that pillaging and killing were being carried out
by ‘the enemy’ in the Samarqand vilayet. By this time ‘Abdallah was ready for action.
Setting off with a large army in late Dhu ’1-qa‘da/19 January 1580, he made first for
Samarqand where he was lavishly entertained by his brother, and the campaign began
with a number of minor engagements nearby. They then marched towards Tashkent
but the wet and cold weather forced the greater part of their army to remain on the left
bank of the Syr-Darya whose waters were too swollen for a crossing to be practical.
“Abdallah took this disappointment philosophically and went hunting, while his army,
which reportedly consisted of 100,000 men, settled down in the area and waited for
the spring. In March the troops which had crossed the river inflicted a defeat on Baba
Sultan and a number of Kuchkunchid Princes near the Syr-Darya. Then a party of
raiders led by a Kuchkinchid Prince was put to flight near Ura Tipa. These successes
for ‘Abdallah's side caused Baba Sultan's brother, Tahir Sultan, to take fright. He
decided to change sides and wrote to offer his allegiance. ‘Abdallah graciously
forgave him for his past misdemeanours and hinted that he would also forgive Baba

Sultan if he followed suit. But Baba Sultan ignored the pardon offered to him.7°
On 20th March ‘Abdallah received good news from Badakhshan. His enemy,
Mirza Shahrukh, had been defeated by the combined forces of Mirza Sulaiman and
the governor of Kabul, Muhammad Hakim, both of whom sent the glad tidings to
‘Abdallah, together with expressions of goodwill. ‘Abdallah generously rewarded

their ambassadors and sent back warm messages of congratulation.7! He had good
cause to be delighted with the news, for now the future safety of Balkh seemed
assured. He was on good terms not only with Mirza Sulaiman, who held the upper
68 Thid., 144a-b.
69 Thid., 145a.
70 Thid., 145b-51a. N.B. Folio 150b recording Tahir Sultans plea is wrongly numbered 151b.

71 Thid., 151a-b.

1561-83

hand in Badakhshan, and his ally Muhammad Hakim, who since 1566 had threatened
Akbar's position on the Mughal throne, but also with Akbar himself, who had

recently indicated that he was not interested in marching in the direction of the
khanate, nor even in retaking the valuable fortress town of Qandahar. In any case
Akbar was unlikely to change his mind and organise an expedition against the khanate
at the time because his half-brother was in a particularly strong position. Muhammad
Hakim had been adopted by the devout Muslims of India who were shocked by
Akbar's assumption of infallibility in matters of dogma and by his blasphemous
-declaration that opposition to his religious rulings would mean ‘damnation in the next

world and loss of religious privileges and property in this’.72
Shortly afterwards ‘Abdallah and his army resumed their march towards the SyrDarya and Tashkent. At this stage he decided to appoint Baba Sultan's nephew,
Muhammad Mu’min, governor of the vast province which stretched from Tashkent to
Andijan and included Khujand. This was a carefully calculated risk which took into
account the young man's loyal service in the two years since he had been appointed to
Andijan, his known hostility towards Baba Sultan, and the fact that the young man's
ancestors had ruled the area for many years. However, although Muhammad Mu’min
was the son of the previous ruler of Tashkent, Darwish Sultan, who had been hostile
to Baba Sultan, he was also a Suyunchid. ‘Abdallah therefore took the precaution of
appointing the amir ‘Abd al-Samad Bi as his ataliq or right-hand man, a position
which the amir had held successfully during the Prince's governorship of Andijan.
Before Muhammad Mu’ min could be installed in Tashkent, however, the town had to
be conquered. Baba Sultan was entrenched there and had sent his Kuchkinchid allies,
together with his own sons and nephews, to deploy their troops along the Syr-Darya
and engage ‘Abdallah in battle as soon as he crossed the river. When they did so,
however, they were defeated by ‘Abdallah's army and Baba Sultan tried to buy time

by offering to make peace.73
“Abdallah, who was well aware of the devastation that another campaign would
bring to the area, decided to give Baba Sultan yet another chance. He would forgive
him again, only this time his pardon was conditional on the surrender of Buzah
Khwar and the other Kichkinchids. Baba Sultan's reaction to ‘Abdallah's offer was
typical. He left Tashkent to join the Qazaqs and Kuchkunchids, but also sent a
hunting-bird as a gift for ‘Abdallah and asked for peace, letting it be known through
his messenger that he would flee even further if there was no hope of a pardon.
Baba Sultan's brother Tahir Sultan who had been left in charge in Tashkent also
tried to win ‘Abdallah's goodwill. He put into fetters and sent to him an amir known
to have encouraged the Kichkinchids to take up arms against ‘Abdallah. This did not
impress ‘Abdallah, nor did it weaken his resolve. He demanded that Tahir Sultan
come and pay homage in person in order to establish the purity of his intentions,
whereupon Tahir Sultan barricaded himself in Tashkent. ‘Abdallah then marched on

towards Tashkent, determined to take the town.”4
What happened next was to have a momentous effect on ‘Abdallah's struggle with
Baba Sultan, and would eventually help to bring it to a close. The Qazaq Princes
suddenly decided not to help Baba Sultan any more, because he had failed to honour

72 See above for the message which Akbar sent with Mirza Fulad. CHI, IV, 94, 95, 103, 120, 123.
73 Hafiz Tanish, 151b-4a.
74 Hajji Mir, 154b-5Sa.

Iskandar's reign

his part of the agreement concluded in 1579, leaving them to raid the khanate on their
own and thus bringing upon them the full force of ‘Abdallah's anger. Why should
they expose themselves to great losses by facing an army of some 100,000 men,
which had won all its engagements so far? Far better to seize and kill Baba Sultan and
his ambassador, and offer their heads to ‘Abdallah as a token of friendship. This was

agreed by all the Qazaq Princes, from their overall ruler, Haqq Nazar Khan,’5 to
Baba Sultan's father-in-law, Jalim Sultan. Jalim Sultan and four other Princes were
accordingly sent to carry out their plan, but Baba Sultan had been forewarned. He
therefore struck first, had them all killed and sent Bazah Khwar in pursuit of Haqq
Nazar Khan.
When this was reported to ‘Abdallah he openly rejoiced, for not only had Baba
Sultan lost useful allies, but the Qazaqs had also been seriously weakened. He at once
wrote to Baba Sultan to congratulate him on killing the ‘age-old enemies’ of their
people, but also called upon him to put Buzah Khwar to death if he wanted to retain

the province of Tashkent. Baba Sultan would be destroyed if he failed to do so, and
‘Abdallah would only wait 10 days for an answer to his ultimatum.76
For Baba Sultan, who was momentarily at a loss after losing the goodwill and
support of the Qazaqs, ‘Abdallah's offer of forgiveness and reinstatement, despite its
tone, was a godsend. He responded to the ultimatum with a message of grovelling
humility and a promise of unswerving loyalty in the future which reached ‘Abdallah
on 21 Rabi‘I 988/6 May 1580. Then he sent troops to fight his former ally and
promised to follow them in order to get the Kuchkunchid's head for ‘Abdallah.
‘Abdallah was well satisfied with this development. Sending back Baba Sultan's
ambassadors, he announced the good news to his father and to Khwajah Sa‘d.
However, the campaign was far from over, and Tashkent, for one, was not willing to
open its doors. ‘Abdallah besieged the town for about three weeks in May 1580, but
although the inhabitants suffered great hardships, they held out. Then, towards the
end of May disquieting news from Samarqand forced ‘Abdallah to give up his
undertaking and to leave the area. A number of Kichkinchid Princes had taken
advantage of the relaxation of defensive measures in Samarqand to seize several of its
outlying districts. And Buzah Khwar, whom Baba Sultan had failed to capture either
through incompetence or design, was also threatening Miyankal.
‘Abdallah marched to Samargand. On the way there he received a message of
allegiance from the new ruler of the Qazags, Shighai Khan, Haqq Nazar Khan having
died either of natural causes or at the hands of Buzah Khwar. Shighai Khan claimed
that he had recently attacked Baba Sultan on the river Talas solely to prove his
devotion to “Abdallah, although in fact he must have been seeking to avenge those of
his kinsmen who had been murdered by the Suyiinchid a few months earlier. His
attack, however, had been singularly unsuccessful. Not only had he been defeated
and forced to flee, but Baba Sultan had seized his baggage train, womenfolk, children
and camp-followers, together with all the cattle in the area, before making off for

Sairam with the apparent intention of joining the Kichkinchids in an attack on Hisar.
‘Abdallah was disappointed to learn about Baba Sultan's latest success and about
his designs on Hisar, but gratified to know that, although his own agreement with the
Suyunchid had been short-lived, he now had an ally in the east on whom he could
75 See more about his power in Abuseitova, Kazakhskoe khanstvo, 50-54.

76 Tbid., 155b-6a.

1561-83

rely for the next round. The scope of ‘Abdallah's foreign relations had become quite
extensive. Although his relations with Muscovy had lapsed temporarily, he had a
good rapport with Shighai Khan, Mirza Sulaiman of Badakhshan, the Mughal
Emperor, and at least two of the Khwarazmians Princes. Indeed ambassadors from
Timur Sultan and Pulad Sultan had come all the way to Tashkent in May that year in
order to ‘express their obedience’; perhaps also to deliver a tribute promised four

years earlier.”7

Meanwhile a combined Kichkinchid and Suyinchid force had seized
Samarqand, and Hisar was also under siege. ‘Abdallah marched on to Samargand,
pressed the siege energetically and retook the town a week later, on 17th June. Baba
Sultan's son, “Abd al-Ghaffar, who was in the town and had been unable to get away

in time, offered his submission. He also handed over the amir who had led the
defence of Samarqand. ‘Abdallah thought it best to pardon the amir, but kept ‘Abd alGhaffar under close surveillance: he could take no chances with a son of Baba Sultan.

Three days after the fall of Samarqand ‘Abdallah returned to the Syr-Darya. This
time he was making for Sairam. He was seeking a confrontation with Baba Sultan
whom he hoped to cow into keeping his double promise of loyalty to the Janibegids
and hostility towards the Kuchkunchids. As soon as Baba Sultan heard that he was
on his way, he sent what had become an automatic message of regret for past
offences, and got in return another request that he should break forthwith with the
Kuchkunchids. ‘Abdallah then marched on towards Turkestan only to find that Baba

Sultan had fled beyond the Qara Tal,’® and that Bizah Khwar and his brothers were
on their way to join him. Troops were at once despatched to intercept them in
Farghana, near Shahrukhiya, but although a battle was fought there in early June, the
Kuchkinchids got away. As “Abdallah was not equipped for a lengthy pursuit, he
reluctantly turned back via Ura Tipa to Bukhara, disappointed that Baba Sultan and
Buzah Khwar were still at large, and probably together. However, his lightning
campaign from Samargand to Farghana via Turkestan had obviously impressed the
Qirghiz nomads, whose camping-grounds extended between Farghana and the TienShan. In the hope of gaining his favour and forestalling any possible attack on their
territory, they hastened to send ambassadors who reached ‘Abdallah's camp on 26

June and delivered a friendly message.”?
“Abdallah was back in Bukhara in late July 1580. Shortly afterwards he received
another message from Baba Sultan, who insisted that his submission was genuine, as
proved by the reliability of the envoys whom he had sent to ‘Abdallah in June. Since
these envoys had been an ataliq, Arslan, and a shaikh, his argument seemed
convincing enough. ‘Abdallah decided therefore to disregard recent rumours of
meetings between Baba Sultan and Buzah Khwar, and before dismissing the latest
envoy from Tashkent he made a point of telling him of his own kindness to Baba
Sultan's son. This might convince Baba Sultan of his good intentions and put an end
to his constant attacks, for they were damaging to the prosperity of the khanate, and
interfered with ‘Abdallah's plans to build caravanserais and cool stopping-places for

77 Tpid., 156b-9b.

78 The editors of Materialy po istorii Kazakhskoi SSR take the Qara Tal (Qara Tau) to be the river
which falls into Lake Balkhash, but from several other mentions of the Qara Tal by ‘Abdallah's
biographer, Hafiz Tanish, in connection with Turkestan, it seems that he meant the Qara Tau
mountain range, which is parallel to the Syr-Darya.

79 Hafiz Tanish, 159b-62b.

Iskandar's reign

the benefit of traders on the routes to China, Kashghar and India.®°
Relations with Baba Sultan continued to improve in the following months. In
early September ‘Abdallah received a message from Baba Sultan's brother, Tahir
Sultan, who apologised for a recent attack on Samarqand, explaining that it had only
been undertaken in order to make the Samarqandi sultans submit to the khaqan. The
following day yet another message of repentance arrived from Baba Sultan. It was
important to encourage Baba Sultan in his good intentions just then, especially as
Buzah Khwar and some of Baba's relatives were threatening Andijan in Farghana.
‘Abdallah therefore decided to send back Baba's son and ‘Abd al-Ghaffar was
despatched, loaded with presents. He reached Tashkent in late Shawwal/7 December
1580 with no less a travelling companion than Qul Baba Kukeltash, ‘Abdallah's righthand man, a capable amir, a good diplomat and a deeply religious man who was just
as keen as his master on fostering trade. Baba Sultan appreciated the honour done to
him. He entertained Qu! Baba lavishly and sent him back with an ambassador of his
own, after pledging his loyalty and stating that he felt only hatred for the
Kichkinchids.®! And indeed for the last six months he had had nothing to do with
them.
He had not intervened when the Kuchkunchids attacked Akhsiket, Marghinan,
Ura Tipa and Andijan in August and September 1580, nor would he help them when
Buzah Khwar and his brothers raided Miyankal in March 1581. This gave “Abdallah

an opportunity to concentrate his troops and to take back Jizaq8? and Ura Tipa in a
lightning campaign, scattering the Princes who left behind some 700 dead as they fled
to the Qipchaq steppes. When the Kuchkunchids returned and took Samarqand in late
Rabi‘I/April, ‘Abdallah gathered an army and marched, once again without
interference from Baba Sultan. He succeeded therefore in chasing the Princes as far as
Uzgend and the Ala Tau mountains in Farghana, after which, taking the cattle and
booty they left behind, he returned to Bukhara, where he arrived in July 1581.
Shortly before ‘Abdallah returned to Bukhara, he was visited by Shighai Khan
who came to offer his help against Baba Sultan. This offer placed ‘Abdallah in a bit of
a quandary, for he was satisfied with Baba Sultan's recent behaviour. However, he
decided that it was important to retain the friendship of the Qazaq leader. And indeed
the fact Baba Sultan fled Tashkent for Turkestan and the Qipchaq steppes on hearing
that ‘Abdallah was crossing the Syr-Darya, seemed to indicate a guilty conscience. In
order to cement his alliance with Shighai Khan and to compensate the Qazaq for the
losses sustained in 1580 against Baba Sultan, ‘Abdallah gave him the province of
Khujand as a feudal fief (igta’), i.e. in return for military help. Shighai Khan and his
son Tawakkul then accompanied him to Uzgend, and ‘Abdallah took the young man
back to Bukhara where he was well treated. ‘Abdallah also instructed Tawakkul in the
military arts, for he wished to please Shighai Khan and knew that he could rely on his
loyalty so long as Tawakkul remained an honoured guest at the Bukharan Court.
Tawakkul soon showed himself to be a young man of promise. This earned him
‘Abdalla's warm praise, together with generous rewards. Impressed by his
outstanding skill at throwing the arrow ‘Abdallah gave him several silver and gold

80 See further about the buildings which ‘Abdallah erected for the use of traders in chapter 12 below.

81 Hafiz Tanish, 162b-3b.

82 Dizdaq, half-way between Samargand and Zamin.

1561-83

goblets, a swift horse, and even the right to carry a standard of his own into battle.83
His generosity secured the young man's loyalty and in the event Tawakkul’s help
against Baba Sultan would prove to be decisive.
The ease and efficiency with which ‘Abdallah had led his army across the khanate
and back greatly impressed his neighbours, all of whom thought it advisable to
establish or maintain friendly relations with him. ‘Messages of complete submission
and obedience’ arrived from Badakhshan in late Dh ’l-qa‘da/late December 1581.
And as for the Noghays, they not only sold a Muscovite ambassador into slavery in
Bukhara in that year, but in December they wrote to announce that they were coining
and saying the khutbah in ‘Abdallah's name. ‘Abdallah was well pleased with these
messages. He treated the Badakhshani and Noghay envoys generously before
dismissing them.*4 Mirza Sulaiman, who was still having trouble with his grandson,
and who could no longer count on help from Kabul, may have hoped for concrete
support from “Abdallah. But, although he might have promised some help, ‘Abdallah
would not commit himself to intervene in the near future. Convinced that Baba Sultan
was too devious ever to be trusted, ‘Abdallah had already begun to prepare for the
campaign which would ‘wipe Baba Sultan from the pages of history’.
He would have been interested, however, to hear from Mirza Sulaiman's envoys
about recent developments in India and Badakhshan. Akbar had shown such obvious
dislike for the Muslim religion since 1580 that many of his Muslim subjects had
rebelled. They had taken up arms against him in the hope of replacing him with
Muhammad Hakim who, although a ‘drunk and a poltroon’, was undoubtedly an
orthodox Sunni. Encouraged by their support, Muhammad Hakim had marched on
Lahore in February 1581, only to retreat hurriedly on hearing that Akbar and his army
were on their way. In August 1581 Akbar had reached Kabul and named his sister
governor of the town. Although Muhammad Hakim was subsequently pardoned and
allowed to return there, he had become powerless and unable to issue orders, or
indeed to help Mirza Sulaiman. The mirza had accordingly tried to reach some
agreement with his grandson, but Shahrukh, who had refused even to see his

protector and suzerain Akbar in the autumn of 1581, did not co-operate.85 This was a
most satisfactory state of affairs, as far as ‘Abdallah was concerned, for it meant that
if he were to invade Badakhshan, neither Muhammad Hakim nor Akbar would

intervene to defend the mirzas.
But first he must put his own house in order. ‘Abdallah set off towards Miyankal
two days after giving the ambassadors an audience. In February 1582 he was joined
by his brother ‘Ibadallah, his second cousin Isfandiyar,8° and Shighai Khan, who
brought a detachment of Qazaqs to swell his army. This would turn out to be a
campaign of epic proportions. First, troops were sent out against Baba Sultan's
brother, Tahir Sultan, who, in true Suyinchid fashion, had given up his temporary
allegiance to ‘Abdallah in order to ravage the countryside between Turkestan and the
Syr-Darya. Then, after Tahir Sultan had been put to flight, “Abdallah set siege to
Sairam. When the town fell in late March he showed statesman-like restraint and
magnanimity by sparing the inhabitants and reinstating their governor. He then
83
84
85
86

Tbhid.,163a-7a.
Thid., 167a. Novosel'skii, 31-32.
Ibid., 167b. CHI, IV, 124-8. Noér, Il, 122.
He was the son of Khusrau Sultan, killed at Shahr-i sabz in 1569.

Iskandar's reign

hastened towards Turkestan to give battle to Baba Sultan, only to find that the
Suyinchid had fled to the north. ‘Abdallah did not hesitate. Taking a mere ten days'
supply of food with him, he gave chase, but on the way to the river Sary Su his
beloved son, ‘Abd al-Mu’min, went hunting and disappeared. ‘Abdallah was greatly
distressed. The thirteen-year-old was found at last, a full 24 hours later, by a brother
of Shighai Khan whom ‘Abdallah warmly thanked and rewarded. Two weeks later,
in further token of his gratitude and trust, he appointed Shighai and Tawakkul to the
vanguard of his army.
By the time ‘Abdallah crossed the Sary Su his men were tired from the long
march and food had nearly run out. He pressed on, regardless, towards the Ulugh
Taq, hoping to force his enemy to give battle. But as soon as Baba Sultan realised that
‘Abdallah was near, he hurried towards the Noghay encampments with his family,
taking with him Buzah Khwar and the greater part of what, according to Hafiz
Tanish, was an enormous army. At this stage ‘Abdallah's nomination of Shighai
Khan and Tawakkul to the vanguard of his army bore fruit, for they returned from
two separate foraging expeditions with much booty, including a great quantity of
livestock, much to the delight of ‘Abdallah's starving soldiers.87
‘Abdallah's army then continued the chase and caught up with Baba Sultan in the
Ulugh Tag. At this stage, because Baba Sultan's army was by far the larger, Shighai
Khan and ‘Abdallah's amirs insisted that ‘Abdallah should not expose himself to
further danger, and he reluctantly accepted their advice. He let them proceed without
him, but while he went hunting his cousin Isfandiyar lost contact with the enemy who
got away. Fortunately, however, the body of troops who were with Tawakkul
managed to find them by the river Turgai, and they were forced to give battle. But
although Tawakkul's knowledge of the steppes had helped him to keep on the trail,
his fighting skill was not highly regarded in the Bukharan army. Forecasting
‘limitless bloodshed and a difficult victory’ if he and his Qazags led the attack, the
official in charge told them to hold back until the later stages of the battle. The battle
was won by their combined efforts, but Baba Sultan and Buzah Khwar got away.
One of “Abdallah's best generals, the qush begi (Master of the Hunt) Khwajam
Quli, was ordered to pursue them, and ‘Abdallah marched south in May 1582 to

reduce the various towns still loyal to the Suyunchids.88 While he was engaged in the
siege of Sabran an unexpected visitor arrived in Bukhara. This was Mirza Sulaiman.
He had come to ask for help against his grandson Shahrukh. ‘Abdallah's father tried

to keep him in Bukhara until ‘Abdallah returned, but the mirza took fright and fled
back to Badakhshan. When he arrived Shahrukh offered to partition Badakhshan with
him. The mirza, however, refused his generous offer and only agreed to take the
town of Kishm. ‘Abdallah was left with the tantalising idea that it would be easy to
intervene in Badakhshan, an idea which he would not forget, especially as the
situation in the province continued to deteriorate.89
Meanwhile the siege of Sabran dragged on and ‘Abdallah's army suffered
severely from lack of food. In June an envoy was sent to Sairam for supplies, but as
he was leaving with large numbers of camels and mules loaded with grain, he was
87 Hafiz Tanish, 168b-75a.
88 Tbid., 175b-7b.
89 Noér, II, 123, gives no precise date for Mirza Sulaiman's flight, but says mistakenly that
“Abdallah was away in Tashkent at the time, fighting the Qazaqs.

1561-83

attacked by the Suyinchid governor of the town and prevented from continuing his
jouney. Another month went by before the starving soldiers at last received
provisions from Bukhara. In the meantime Tawakkul had earned further praise and
rewards from “Abdallah and his brother for succeeding, where ‘Ibadallah's men had
failed, in tracking down and taking prisoner Baba Sultan's brother Tahir Sultan. As
for Khwajam Quli and the men sent to pursue Baba Sultan, although they had fought
him twice, taking much booty and inflicting heavy casualties, they had been forced to
give up the chase when Baba Sultan reached the Noghay encampments. And despite
their recent embassy to Bukhara and their offer of allegiance to ‘Abdallah the
Noghays welcomed his arch-enemy with open arms.
‘It was not long, however, before Baba Sultan was back in the khanate. The

Noghays soon found out that he and Bizah Khwar intended to repay their hospitality
by murdering their chiefs and taking their land. They then decided to take him
prisoner and deliver him to ‘Abdallah, but Baba Sultan was warned of their plan.
Although his first reaction was to take up arms against them, on the advice of his
followers he returned instead to the khanate, hoping to relieve Sabran and to resume
the struggle with ‘Abdallah after joining forces with those of his relatives who were
threatening Shahrukhiya. When Baba Sultan got near Turkestan, he sent two Qalmaq
servants to the town for supplies. On the way back they were apprehended by
Tawakkul who questioned them closely and discovered Baba Sultan's whereabouts.
Although he had only a few men with him, Tawakkul set off at once. He soon came
upon Baba Sultan and Buzah Khwar who were apparently preparing a meal. They at
once took to their horses, Buzah Khwar making for Sairam, and Baba Sultan fleeing
to the Qara Tal mountains, with Tawakkul in hot pursuit. When he reached the
mountains Baba Sultan turned round to fight, and he fell to Tawakkul's arrows.
On 17 Rajab 990/7 August 1582 Tawakkul brought Baba Sultan's head to
‘Abdallah and, not surprisingly, he was generously rewarded. He was promoted in
‘Abdallah's army, given money and rich robes, and even granted the vilayet of
Afarinkent near Samarqand as his fief. The grant of Afarinkent was as much a reward
for service as an insurance for the future, for Tawakkul's support could then be
expected as a matter of course. By giving Tawakkul a town in the very centre of the
khanate which had once been his own father's appanage, ‘Abdallah was also making
it clear that he considered the young man and his Qazaq supporters as his vassals.9°
The news of Baba Sultan's death made such a great impact on the people of
Sairam that they put Buzah Khwar to death shortly afterwards in order to propitiate
‘Abdallah. However, Sabran, which was defended by Baba Sultan's son ‘Abd al-

Sattar, refused to believe the news or to surrender. In his anger ‘Abdallah had ‘Abd
al-Sattar's brother, ‘Abd al-Latif, and his uncle Tahir Sultan put to death in full view
of the defenders; then he pressed on with the siege, despite pleas by Khwajah Sa‘d on
behalf of the people of the town, and Sabran fell on 2 Sha‘*ban 990/22 August 1582.
Two days earlier the town of Shahrukhiya, which had held out against ‘Abdallah's
brother Distim for three months, opened its doors to ‘Abdallah and he spared the

garrison.?!
‘Abd al-Sattar, on the other hand, was put to death. Much rich booty was taken

90 Hafiz Tanish, 178b-184b.
91 Tbid., 184b-7b, 192b-3b. N.B. ‘Abdallah is said to have been present at the fall of both these
towns, although they were some 200 miles away from each other.

Iskandar's reign

from Sabran, ranging from fine ornaments and materials to bows and arrows, jewels
and large quantities of money, but here too ‘Abdallah spared the defenders of the
town, whom Hafiz Tanish describes as ‘Turkish archers and musketeers’ and
.?2 He then
‘Tajiks’, because, he said, they had acted ‘out of ignorance and delusion’
which
Turkestan
to
on
appointed one of his amirs to the town and marched
stronghold
Sultan's
Baba
been
had
town
the
surrendered without a fight. Although
‘Abdallah gave orders for the inhabitants to be left unmolested. He even had presents
distributed all round, but those who showed open hostility to his men were dealt with
harshly and ‘the desert was covered with (their) blood’.
The easter parts of the khanate being well and truly under his control, ‘Abdallah
now made his way back to Bukhara, arriving there in late Ramadan/11 October 1582.
The campaign had lasted nearly ten months. ‘Abdallah had marched over 1,700 miles
and defeated enemy forces as far away as the Ulugh Taq and lake Chelkar-Tengiz, an
amazing achievement, which he commemorated by having a mosque built, while his
warriors erected a pyramid of skulls in the best Turkic and Chinghizid tradition.
His main enemies, Buzah Khwar and Baba Sultan, were at last dead. It now
remained for the conquered territory to be. distributed among the Janibegids.
‘Abdallah conferred with his father, and it was decided that his brother, ‘Abd alQuddus, also known as Dustim, should receive Tashkent and its dependencies,

including Khujand and Ura Tipa. Farghana was entrusted to his second cousin,
Isfandiyar. Shahr-i sabz, near enough to Samarqand to be easily kept under control,
went to the one Suyunchid who had remained loyal: Mu’min (Muhammad Mu’ min)
Sultan. This left Balkh as the only major province not ruled by a Janibegid and, since
“Abdallah's son, ‘Abd

al-Mu’min, was now 16, it was given to him. Nazar Bi, who

had ruled Balkh loyally since 1573, was summoned to Bukhara and asked to hand
over the keys to the khaqan's grandson, a decision which he was expected to accept

gracefully.93
Leaving his amirs to pursue those of the Suyinchid and Kachkunchid rebels who
were still at large, “Abdallah then relaxed and went hunting south of Balkh. He did
not forget, however, that he was responsible for the welfare of the people of the
khanate. Realising that there was not enough water in the area for agricultural
purposes, he gave orders for a dam to be built. He also showed concern for learning
and religion by having vast sums of money distributed to various ‘people of learning
and study’, and he had frequent meetings with his religious mentor Khwajah Sa‘d.
He continued to hunt in several parts of the khanate to the end of 1582, well satisfied

with his achievements. When two more rebel Princes were captured in Hisar and

Andijan,** he felt that all the internal problems of the khanate were at last solved and
he began to contemplate
November-27 December)
that, if he should attack,
widespread rebellions in

the prospect of foreign expansion. In Dhi ’1-qa‘da (27
he received news from Khurasan which seemed to suggest
he would find little organised resistance. He was told of
Iran, caused by Shah Muhammad Khudabanda's idle and

92 Thid., 194a-b. No details are given about the origin of these Turkish archers who might have been
living in the eastern parts of the khanate since the 1550s when Nauriz Ahmad was given soldiers
by Sulaiman the Magnificent to help him fight the Janibegids.

93 Tbid., 195a-7b, 188b-9a. Hafiz Tanish's account becomes rather confused here because he no
longer follows the chronological order of events.

4 They were Muzaffar, son of Jawanmard ‘Ali and Baba Sultan, brother of Buzah Khwar.
42

1561-83

foolish ways. At the same time the bitter conflict between ‘Ali Quli Khan Shamla,

governor of Herat, and Murtada Quli Pornak, governor of Mashhad, was ruining

Khurasan and driving the inhabitants out. This seemed an ideal time to fight the
heretics of Iran. ‘Abdallah was repeatedly urged to do so by the chief qadi of Chahar
Jay, Nur al-Din Muhammad, who nursed him back to health when he fell ill at

Chahar Juy later that winter.9° However, a few more years went by before ‘Abdallah

could intervene in Khurasan, one reason for this being a series of deaths in his
immediate family, which made a certain amount of reorganisation necessary in the

khanate.
The first death, that of his brother ‘Abd al-Latif in late January 1583, caused no
particular problem, for “Abdallah at once gave the town of Shiburghan to one of his
most reliable amirs, ‘Abd al-Samad Bi. About a month later, in Muharram
991/February 1583 a message was received from ‘Abdallah's recent envoy to
Muscovy, now in Khwarazm, who asked for an escort for the last lap of his journey.
This envoy was the first to visit Muscovy since 1568, relations between the two
countries having lapsed, following Cossack attacks on travellers in the Volga region
in 1578 and 1579. An escort was needed in case of attack by the Khwarazmian

Sultans during the journey.%7 It is not known why the Khwarazmians had suddenly
turned hostile, but the escort provided was a suitable deterrent and no obstacle was
put in the ambassador's way. Much to ‘Abdallah's delight he delivered 12 ‘falcons,
ready trained’ and a number of sables, all of which were gifts from Ivan the Terrible.
Ready-trained hunting-birds were a valuable present and they were handled with
particular care in Muscovy where since 1550 falconers constituted a separate guild
which enjoyed many privileges.98 Nevertheless, he parted with some of the
Muscovite falcons to Khwajah Sa‘d, himself a keen huntsman, to Nazar Bi, who had
to be compensated somehow

for the loss of Balkh, and to Shahim Bi, who had

persuaded the people of Sairam to put Bizah Khwar to death.99 This was a generous
and wise move which was to pay off, for the recipients of these gifts remained
grateful and loyal to him.
At about this time another of ‘Abdallah's ambassadors must have returned to the
khanate: this was the ambassador sent to Istanbul to take part in the celebrations
organised by Murad III for the circumcision of his 16-year-old son, Mehmet, in June
1582. His report on the six-week long grandiose celebrations must have made a
strong impression on ‘Abdallah and he no doubt determined that he would impress

the Sultan with his own military achievements in the years to come.!
In March 1583 ‘Abdallah was disappointed to hear that the Suyunchid Prince
whom he had appointed to Shahr-i sabz five months earlier had rebelled. Mu’min
Sultan had decided to recover Andijan, which he had governed since 1578 on
‘Abdallah's behalf. He gathered an army and marched, hoping to force “Abdallah's
appointee, Diustim Bi Qushchi, to surrender the town in exchange for Shahr-i sabz.
Troops were sent against him, but ‘Abdallah did not think it necessary to intervene
95 He had come to the throne in February 1578, after the murder of his brother, Isma’il II.

96 Ibid., 197b-8b, 190b-1a.

97 Thid., 199b-200a. See Armstrong, 104, quoting the Remezov chronicle, for the Cossack attacks.

98 Dementiev, 14-15. I am indebted to Svetlana Jacquesson who drew my attention to Dementiev's
article about falconry.

99 Hafiz Tanish, 199a.
100 Hammer, Geschichte, II, 516. Hammer, Histoire, VII, 134-60.
43

Iskandar's reign

with successfully, and he preferred to remain nearer Bukhara, so that he could
monitor events in Khurasan, and perhaps, at long last, launch an attack on the

province.
101
In preparation for this he sent the qish begi Khwajam Quli and other amirs to
Maimana and Jijektu on the frontier with Khurasan so that they might chastise the
tribes whose loyalty was suspect. When the chiefs of these tribes were brought to him
on 15 Rabi‘I 991/8 April 1583 he had them all put to death. By then he had received
an appeal for help from the governor of Herat, ‘Ali Quli Khan, who explained that
Shah Muhammad Khudabanda, having taken a violent dislike to him, was on his way
to Khurasan with an enormous army in order to annihilate him. ‘Ali Quli Khan's
request for help gave ‘Abdallah the pretext he needed in order to invade. Although he
had not fully recovered from his illness, he decided to intervene. He sent a warm
message of support to ‘Ali Quli, and after despatching Khwajam Quli back to the
Khurasan frontier to guard against a possible attack by the Shah, he prepared to
follow him into the province. He then left Ura Tipa for Samarqand and went on to
Balkh, where he put to death the financial supervisor of the town, because he refused

to supply the large quantity of money needed for the campaign.
10
At this stage ‘Abdallah was told that several Suyinchid Princes had rebelled in
support of Mu’min Sultan. They had marched towards Andijan with him, sowing
terror on their path. ‘Abdallah's own brother, Distam, who was then in Ura Tipa,
had apparently fled to Samarqand, sending Dustim Bi Qushchi to defend the fort of
Marghinan against the rebels. The siege of Marghinan was under way, and there was
little doubt that a serious situation had developed which required ‘Abdallah to
intervene personally. His expedition to Khurasan therefore had to be postponed. He
marched instead to Marghinan, but in the event the rebels proved to be far less
determined than Baba Sultan had been. They soon abandoned the siege when loyal
troops came on the scene and by the time ‘Abdallah arrived, they had fled, first to
Andijan, and then towards Kashghar. ‘Abdallah's brother Distim, his cousin
Isfandiyar and Tawakkul gave chase, forcing them to give battle in the desert between
Ush and Kashghar on 24 May. During the battle Tawakkul captured Mu’ min Sultan's
brother, Mehdi Sultan, together with Baba Sultan's son, ‘Abd al-Ghaffar, and put
them both to death.
No doubt Tawakkul thought that he would be rewarded when he presented
“Abdallah with their heads, as he had been when he had brought Baba Sultan's head.
But ‘Abdallah was highly displeased. He showed his displeasure by rewarding his
brother and his cousin, and ignoring Tawakkul's achievement altogether. He refused
to see Tawakkul's recent success in the same light as his success against Baba Sultan.
Baba Sultan had been killed in a straight fight, which was perfectly acceptable. But
this time Tawakkul had taken it upon himself to execute two prisoners. This, to
‘Abdallah, smacked of insubordination, especially when his own brother and cousin

were at hand at the time and could have easily been consulted as to the wisdom or
Suitability of such an action. In any case ‘Abdallah himself was not very far away
from the scene of the battle and he should have been given the opportunity of deciding

101 Hafiz Tanish, 199a, 200a. Jalal al-Din Muhammad, 55b-56a, says nothing about ‘Ali Quli's
appeal for help. His account of “Abdallah's relations with the governor of Herat is entirely onesided: he alleges that “Abdallah repeatedly wrote to ‘Ali Quli, hoping that his friendly approaches
might persuade the governor to give him the town.

102 Thid., 200b- 1a.

1561-83

the fate of the prisoners. Tawakkul accordingly received neither praise nor honour,
and he strongly resented this. Feeling ‘deceived’ and let down by ‘Abdallah, he
betook himself to the steppes of Qipchagq, there to brood over his ill-treatment and to
await an opportunity for revenge. The honeymoon between the khanate and the
Qazaqs was largely over. Good relations were never again restored for long, the
hostility and unreliability of the Qazaqs becoming a thorn in the side of many a ruler
of Bukhara.
For the moment,

however,

‘Abdallah

triumphed

and wrote

to his father

announcing his success. By the end of May three of the rebel Princes had been put to
death. Only Mu‘min Sultan and the other sons of the Suyinchid Prince Darwish
Sultan were still at large, and ‘Abdallah hoped that the governor of Farankur on the

frontier of Badakhshan would agree to execute them.!%
He prepared to return to Bukhara and perhaps proceed to Khurasan, but was
forced to change his plans on the sudden death of his father Iskandar in early Jumada
1/22 June 1583.194 This was a crucial event which might well trigger off further
rebellion in the khanate. It was essential for ‘Abdallah to consolidate his hold over the
khanate and to be officially recognised as khaqan before he could think of foreign
adventure. Although it was reassuring to receive messages of condolence from Iran,
Khurasan, Kabul and Badakhshan, for this meant that his neighbours thought his
authority unquestioned and therefore would not attack, he must persuade the Princes
and amirs of the khanate to accept him rather than his cousin, Uzbeg Sultan, or his

two brothers, all of whom were older.!° Once again ‘Abdallah turned for help and
support to the Jaibari shaikhs, and once again they threw their weight behind him,
thus ensuring that his takeover proceeded smoothly and without any difficulty.

103 Thid., 201b-3a.
104 Thid., 201a, 203b. Hafiz Tanish gives two different months for his death,

Jumada I and

Jumada

Il, but it is clear from the context that the first month quoted is a mistake.
was
105 Thid., 205a. According to Mahmid b. Wali (excerpts in Materialy), 354 and ff., ‘Abdallah
Hafiz
the youngest of four. This appears to contradict the evidence of 'Abdallah's biographer,
Hafiz
Tanish (Salahetdinova, Hafiz, 88), who says that he was Iskandar's first (eldest?) However,
Abdallah's
Tanish might have only chosen the word ‘first’ in order to indicate the preeminence of
personality over that of his brothers.

3
Foreign expansion under
‘Abdallah and ‘Abd al-Mu’min (1583-1598)

When he heard of his father's death, ‘Abdallah did not attempt to return at once to
Bukhara. Knowing that Khwajah Sa‘d was away on pilgrimage,! he waited for him
to return. He needed the khwajah's support and felt sure that together they would find

a formula to convince the people of the khanate of the legitimacy of his claim to the
throne. ‘Abdallah remained in Khujand, but his brother ‘Ibadallah hurried to Bukhara
to pay the last respects to their father. It was soon clear, however, that this Prince had
no ambition to succeed to the throne, for he contented himself with attending a funeral
banquet and distributing presents in memory of his father, after which he returned to
Samargand. Similarly neither Uzbeg Sultan, nor Distim Sultan made any attempt to
assert their claims.
When Khwajah Sa‘d returned to the khanate in late August 1581 he at once set off
towards Khujand to offer his condolences to ‘Abdallah. ‘Abdallah met him near Ura
Tipa. A funeral banquet took place, during which the virtues of the deceased were
extolled and gifts were distributed to all those present. The following day “Abdallah
called on Khwajah Sa‘d, who told him that the Juibari shaikhs and other religious

men would support his candidature, for he was eminently capable of protecting the
shari‘a (Muslim law), and no other quality was more laudable in a ruler. The Hanafi
principle that ‘he who gets (overall power) is he whose justice and encouragement of
religion are as clear as sunlight’ would be used to persuade the deeply religious
people of the khanate that they must ignore the Chinghizid (actually the Abalkhairid)
practice of selecting the oldest member of the ruling family.2 Delighted with the
khwajah's support and his resourcefulness, Abdallah wrote at once to the various
governors announcing his accession. He then made his way to Bukhara and invited
‘Ibadallah to a banquet outside Samarqand, where Khwajah Sa‘d, no doubt,
explained the religious principle underpinning ‘Abdallah's accession.
‘Abdallah reached Bukhara in mid-Sha'ban 991/4 September, and his accession
was duly solemnised. He rewarded Khwajah Sa‘d for his support by appointing him
shaikh al-Islam, and gave him some 5,000 acres of tax-free land with appertaining
water-rights.3 Khwajah Sa‘d's close connection with ‘Abdallah was clearly
demonstrated when he took part in the consecration ceremony, holding one corner of
the white felt on which the new khan was raised in the air. Messages of allegiance
came to ‘Abdallah from all over the khanate, and it was soon obvious that no one

! He was also known as Khwajah Kalan Khwajah.
2 Hafiz Tanish, 203b-206a.
3 Ibid., 206b-8b. Abduraimov, “O maloizvestnom istochnike”, 124. The khwajah received 12,500
tanabs of land.

1583-98

would oppose his accession, for the remaining Abilkhairid Princes either lacked
ambition, or were reluctant to get involved in what was likely to be a hopeless
struggle against a successful and determined campaigner. ‘Abdallah could therefore
contemplate the idea of foreign expansion at last. He decided to march against Mirza
Shahrukh of Badakhshan whose hostility had manifested itself more than once and
who was a dangerous and troublesome neigbour. It was also important to send an
embassy to Muscovy, in order to convey his thanks for the falcons received and to
announce his accession. “Abdallah's ambassador was accordingly despatched. He
was present at the coronation ceremony in honour of Ivan the Terrible's son Fedor in
March 1584, and he cannot have been impressed by the appearance of this weakwilled, melancholy and dull-witted young man.4
Before marching into Badakhshan ‘Abdallah sent Shahrukh an ultimatum,
demanding the surrender of Ghuri and Kahmard, and also the return of those of his
nationals who had been living in Badakhshan. Shahrukh hastened to send an
ambassador, but the message of obedience and regret for his past actions which this
ambassador conveyed fell far short of the agreement which might have saved him.>
“Abdallah set off for Nesef on 6 Muharram 992/19 January 1584 then, after a meeting
with Khwajah Sa‘d, who blessed the campaign, he called at Balkh to see ‘Abd alMu’min. On 6 Safar/18 February, he left Balkh for Qunduz. The campaign was
incredibly quick and successful. Mirza Shahrukh made no attempt to stand and fight.
He fled before ‘Abdallah's army in the direction of Mughal India, leaving his amirs to
defend the province. The people of Badakhshan had become so disaffected by
oppression and injustice that his amirs readily agreed to surrender after being told that
they would be spared. Within two months the towns of Taliqan, Ghuri, Kahmard,

Qunduz and Rustaq had surrendered without a fight. Kishm, Narin and Khinjan had
fallen to ‘Abdallah's troops after a single battle. Most of Shahrukh's surviving amirs
and soldiers had joined ‘Abdallah's army, and only Kulab, where two of Shahrukh's
wives and his son Muhammad Zaman had sought refuge, was still holding out.
‘Abdallah was delighted. He wrote to Khwajah Sa‘d to announce his success and
to invite him to hunt in the area,® but Kulab put up a stubborn resistance and showed
no signs of weakening, despite constant attacks by ‘Abd al-Mu’min. Reinforcements
had to be sent for, ‘Abdallah himself had to take control of the siege operations, and
after a two and a half month siege the town fell at last in late June 1584. “Abdallah
now toured the conquered province, relaxing in the pleasant climate and hunting, but
also trying to persuade the inhabitants to settle in the neglected area adjoining the
frontier and to till the land. His main supporter, Khwajah Sa‘d, was given 430 acres
of land to develop, and Qu! Baba Kukeltash began to build a medresseh in Taliqan
with ‘Abdallah's approval.
By the end of July the situation had changed. ‘Abdallah's conquest seemed to be
under threat, for Mirza Shahrukh and his grandfather were marching on Taliqan with
a large army. However, although the mirzas regained control briefly, they fled as.
soon as they heard that ‘Abdallah's nephew was marching against them. This Prince,
whose father and grandfather came from Astrakhan and whose full name was Din
Muhammad b.Jani Muhammad, was to become well known in the khanate for his
military prowess. On this occasion, together with ‘Abd al-Samad Bi and a force of
4 Horsey, 278. Pares, 160, says Fedor was ‘more fit for a convent than for the throne’ and his face

was ‘fixed in a continual and foolish smile’.
5 Abia ’I-Fadl, Akbarnama, Ill, 444. Hafiz Tanish, 21 1a.

6 Thid., 211b-18a.
47

‘Abdallah and ‘Abd al-Mu’min

only 150, he gave chase to the mirzas and their large army. When he came upon them
high in the Hindu Kush, he forced them to fight and he crushed their army in early
September 1584. The Badakhshan campaign was well and truly over. ‘Abdallah left
for Bukhara, where he arrived on 17 October 1584 and Shahrukh fled to India,
arriving there in January 1585.7
As in 1581 the success and speed of the campaign impressed his neighbours. The
Qazaqs, Khwarazmians, Kashghariyans, Khurasanis and the people of Moghulistan
all hastened to send embassies. Whether or not they brought requests and
supplications, as suggested by ‘Abdallah's biographer, the main purpose of these
embassies must have been to congratulate and propitiate him, for they were all afraid
of his army. The Khwarazmian Princes may have also promised that they would no
longer threaten his envoys to Muscovy. As for ‘Ali Quli of Herat, no doubt he
renewed his plea for help, but ‘Abdallah would do nothing until he knew how Akbar
would react to the defeat of his one-time protégé, Shahrukh. No message of
congratulations was sent by the Noghays on this occasion because they were
estranged from ‘Abdallah. They were angry because Noghay captives purchased from
the Cossacks were being sold in the slave market of Bukhara in 1584, and he had not
forgiven them for welcoming Baba Sultan two years earlier.8
The messages from Kashghariya and Moghulistan deserve special consideration.
These two countries were at loggerheads with each other, as the former had wrested
most of its territory from the latter. Moghulistan stretched along the basin of the Ili
and was situated to the north of Kashghariya, between Lake Balkhash and the Tien
Shan. Kashghariya, called Little Bukhariya in the west, was roughly identical to
modern Sinkiang, and included the towns of Yarkand, Aqsu, Khotan, Jalish (modern
Qarashar) and Turfan. The ruling family of Kashghariya claimed descent from
Genghis Khan and resided in Yarkand. They showed keen interest in the fate of
Farghana, which they coveted. So far their attitude towards ‘Abdallah had been less
than friendly.
As already mentioned, in 1557 ‘Abd al-Rashid Khan provided the Kichkinchid
Sultan Sa‘id with troops which enabled him to retake Samargand from ‘Abdallah's
nominee. In 1560, after Mirza Ibrahim of Badakhshan was put to death by Pir
Muhammad, ’Abd al-Rashid showed his disapproval by sending his wife, Chichak
Khanum, and two of his sons, Abt Sa‘id and Sifi Sultan, for the express purpose of
condoling with the widow, who was herself a Kashghariyan Princess. In fact the
Kashghariyans had done more than just condole: they had interfered with the political
life of Badakhshan. Chichak Khanum had encouraged the widow to claim
precedence over Mirza Sulaiman's wife, Haram Begum, on behalf of her infant son,
Shahrukh. For his part Safi Sultan had tried to seize Badakhshan from Mirza
Sulaiman. But when the plot was discovered Chichak Khanum protested her
innocence and married off Abu Sa‘id to Haram Begum's daughter,? thus developing
the Kashghariyan connection in the province. In case ‘Abdallah thought that this
marriage was responsible for much of the hostility later manifested towards him by
both Mirza Sulaiman and Shahrukh,

‘Abd al-Rashid's successor,

“Abd al-Karim,

7 Tbid., 218b-229a. Aba "l-Fadl, Akbarndma, III, 447, 515. Abduraimov, Ocherki, Il, 47.
Akhmedov, “Rol”, 19, says Khwajah Sa‘d refused ‘Abdallah's offer of the whole of Badakhshan.
8 Pekarskii, 6. Urus, chief of the Great Horde, complained about this to the Tsar's envoy in 1584-5.

9 Hafiz Tanish, 229a. See Bartol'd, Sochineniya, Il, 273, and Baddeley, II, 25, about Little
Bukhariya; Shah Mahmud, intr. 12, nn.31, 34, 45, about Moghulistan; Abi ’1-Fadl, Akbarndma,

Ill, 149-57, about Mirza Sulaiman and his Kashghariyan visitors.

1583-98
thought it worthwhile congratulating ‘Abdallah on the conquest of Badakhshan. He
may have also hoped for help against Moghulistan, but none was offered, for
“Abdallah had more pressing matters on his mind and he intended ultimately to pursue
his campaign against Khurasan.
During the autumn of 1584 ‘Abdallah remained in the khanate to deal with
administrative and taxation problems. The cold was such that he did not go hunting as
usual, but remained in Bukhara until the spring, seeing to it that food was distributed
to the poor of the town. His son, on the other hand, ignored the cold and spent the
winter hunting. The fact that neither of them was in Balkh and Badakhshan, and that

Badkahshan itself was poorly guarded, triggered off a rebellion in Badakhshan,
which Mirza Sulaiman took advantage of in order to attack. The mirza had not
followed his grandson to India when they lost the province to ‘Abdallah. He had
sought refuge in Langhamat, a province under the jurisdiction of Kabul, waiting
patiently for a chance to recoup his fortune.!° Then in the early spring of 993/1585 he
left Kabul for Taliqan with a large army which, according to Abi ’1-Fadl, had been

provided by Muhammad Hakim.'! However, his vanguard was at once defeated by
“Abdallah's nephew Din Muhammad. Later, although his army greatly increased in
size after the people of Badakhshan rallied to him, Mirza Sulaiman was himself
defeated by “Abd al-Mu’min. He was no match for the young man. After a fierce
battle near Khutlan the mirza was forced to flee, never to return. The seventeen-yearold Prince remained behind long enough to have 8,000 Badakhshanis executed on the
spot and to have a tower built from their heads. Then after giving this ominous insight
into the future treatment of his enemies, he returned to Balkh in late June 1585.12
Meanwhile Tawakkul had taken advantage of Mirza Sulaiman's attack and of the
ensuing concentration of ‘Abdallah's troops in the south to attack Tashkent in the
north. The governor of Tashkent, Abdallah's brother Dustim, who had fled in 1583
when faced with the mere likelihood of an attack by the Suyunchid Mu’min Sultan,
reacted courageously on this occasion. He marched at once against the Qazaq Prince,
but his men were few and ill-equipped, and he was disastrously defeated. Tawakkul
was delighted with his success. He relaxed with his army near Sairam, resting on his
laurels, and was therefore totally unprepared when ‘Abdallah's brother, “Ibadallah,
marched from Samargand to deal with him. When Tawakkul heard that he was on his
way, rather than cross swords with his former commanding officer, he left for the
Qipchaq steppes. However, he fully intended to return. ‘Abdallah was equally
determined not to allow him to gain another victory in the khanate, so he demoted
Distim, to whom he gave the governorship of Karmina, and replaced him with his
cousin, Uzbeg Sultan, who was a more capable military leader. This proved to be a
wise move, for the appointment of Uzbeg Sultan to a position of such authority
ensured that he remained loyal to ‘Abdallah, and he would strive to retain his post by
defending Tashkent energetically and effectively in the future.13
The emergency was over. ‘Abdallah marked his success by detailing large
numbers of men from the town of Hisar to repair a damaged canal belonging to

Khwajah Sa‘d.!4 Then he began to prepare for the month of the Fast when suddenly,

10 Samsam al-Daula, III, 276.
11 Hafiz Tanish, 231a, 235a, is unclear about the date when Mirza Sulaiman left Kabul for
Badakhshan which he places both in early Rabi‘ II/2 April and also in hut/February.

12 Thid., 229b-34a. Aba ’I-Fadl, Akbarndma, III, 514-5.
13 Tpid., 201b, 235a-b, 238b.
14 Abduraimov, “O maloizvestnom istochnike”, 124.

‘Abdallah and ‘Abd al-Mu’min

in early Ramadan/27 August 1585, his brother ‘Ibadallah was murdered. The ~
murderer was an official who seems to have resented the careful control which
‘Abdallah and his town governors had been exercising with regard to taxation.
However upset ‘Abdallah might have been to hear the news,!> he must have been
relieved that it did not lead to a general rebellion in the khanate. He went to
Samarqand, distributed the usual largesses after the funeral, and appointed a new
governor. He also made suitable financial provision for ‘Ibadallah's son Yadgar, then

he went hunting in the area of Ura Tipa.!®
Soon, however, he heard disquieting news about recent developments in India.
Upon the death of the governor of Kabul, Muhammad Hakim, in early August, Akbar
had at once sent troops to the area to prevent the acting governor from seeking
‘Abdallah's support for himself and for the sons of the deceased governor, as he
intended to do. On 11 Shahriwar/2 September Akbar had left the capital, Fathpur
Sikri, setting off in the direction of the Punjab, then on 7 Adar/28 November orders
had been sent for the roads to the Indus and Kabul to be made passable for carriages.
Whether Akbar wished to march as far as Kabul himself,!”7 or else intended to
reinstate the mirzas in Badakhshan and perhaps invade the khanate, either threat was
serious and had to be averted at all costs. During the autumn of 1585 ‘Abdallah
therefore sent to India a well-respected and highly considered sayyid, Mir/Amir
Quraish, whose brief was to restore friendly relations and to ascertain Akbar's

intentions. If it could be established that Akbar had no intention of attacking the
khanate, then ‘Abdallah would be free at last to realise his long-cherished dream of
glory and to begin the conquest of Khurasan.
‘Abdallah was also keen to find out whether recent events in Siberia had affected
his relations with Muscovy and Siberia. The fact that Siberia had been taken for the
Tsar by Ermak and the Cossack bands who had killed Bukharan traders on the Volga
in 1578-9 was less than reassuring. The Siberian ruler Kuchum, who since 1555 had
controlled the part of Siberia situated around the Tobol and Irtysh rivers, was a
Chinghizid Prince very distantly related to the Abulkhairids, and certainly in touch
with Bukhara. He was known to have asked for Bukharan mullahs to come over and
convert his subjects to Islam, he had trading relations with Bukhara, and ever since
the 1570s he had attacked the Muscovite settlements in the area. He had lost his
capital, Isker, to Ermak in 1581 but three years later he had had his revenge. A false
rumour that Kuchum was preventing Bukharan traders from provisioning the
Muscovite settlers had enticed Ermak as far as the river Vagai in 1584 and, during a
surprise attack at night, he and his men were cut to pieces.!8
It was important that Tsar Fedor should not be left with the impression that
anyone from the khanate had been involved in the deception that led to Ermak's death.
To avoid the disruption of the Bukharo-Muscovite trade as a result of this incident,
‘Abdallah sent to Moscow an experienced ambassador, Muhammad ‘Ali, who had

been there before.!9 Muhammad ‘Ali was given a large, multi-coloured Indian tent
15 Akhmedoy, Istoriko-geograficheskaya literatura, 189-90, says that the brothers had fallen out.

16 Hafiz Tanish, 237a-9a.
17 Aba ’I-Fadl, Akbarndma, Ill, 466-73. In fact Akbar merely wanted to secure his control over
Kabul and he did so by appointing a governor in November of that year.
18 Ziyaev, Uzbeki, 7, says that in 1574-5 Kuchum wrote to Bukhara for religious officials and also,
possibly, for help, after which his brother, Ahmad Girei, came over with an army. Miller, I, 1968, 201, 256-60. Howorth, II, ii, 932-995. Sibirskiya letopisi, 147-8, 340-1. Armstrong, 104.
19 Materialy, 103. That was why on his next visit, in 1589, Muhammad 'Ali said this was his third

1583-98

and also a freed Russian captive to present to the Tsar. In addition he took valuable
gifts of his own - two pieces of saddlery, two copper kettledrums incrusted with
gold, a patterned china cup painted with gold-leaf, together with a helmet, a sabre and
sheath, a bow and arrow set, and a knife, all of which were made of Damask steel
chased with gold. In return ‘Abdallah must have expected to obtain a good number of
hunting-birds, for there were six falconers in the envoy's suite of 19. ‘Abdallah also
hoped that his envoy, would purchase valuable goods in exchange for the large
quantity of materials and the 1,500 lb of dye which he took to Moscow.
Muhammad ‘Ali travelled from Astrakhan to Kazan' in the company of an
ambassador from Urganj and a Muscovite escort. In November he wrote to the Tsar
from Kazan' complaining of the cold and requesting no less than 30 carts to carry
him, his goods and his suite as far as Moscow. The visit of both ambassadors
appears to have been a success, for Tsar Fedor is known to have sent return
embassies under Baikram Karmanov and Yanysh Yanaev to Bukhara and Urganj in
1586.!9 No details are known about the aims and success, if any, of these embassies,
but “Abdallah is sure to have taken the Muscovite mission to Bukhara as clear proof
that Tsar Fedor, like his father before him, wanted to encourage and develop relations
with the khanate.
There was much activity in the diplomatic field in that year, for, not only was Mir

Quraish busy carrying out his delicate mission in India,2° but ambassadors were
exchanged with Turkey and Khurasan, and a Bukharan envoy was despatched to
Kashghariya. The Ottoman Sultan Murad III, who, since 1578 had been fighting Iran
on and off, began by sending Mustafa Chawish to the khanate with a request for
“Abdallah to take action in Khurasan. “Abdallah sent the envoy back through Iran
with a strong escort and in his answer, which alone has survived, he took some pains
to explain why he had been unable so far to mount an expedition against the
‘Qizilbash heretics’. He mentioned his struggle with the Princes of Samarqand, with
Baba Sultan and more recently with Tawakkul, and he declared that he was now

ready to ‘remove (the Qizilbash) from the face of the earth’.2! On receiving this letter
Murad III hastened to despatch new envoys to ‘Abdallah in the hope of co-ordinating
their attacks on Iran. However, the only one whose name is known, Salah Shah,

travelled via India and took three years to reach the khanate, by which time, circa
1590, his message was well and truly out-of-date.22 Nevertheless a measure of coordination was achieved in 1588, no doubt through the efforts of other, secret
envoys, whose existence was postulated in 1591 by the Venetian envoy to the Porte,
Lorenzo Bernardo. Attributing the low ebb in Iran's fortune to a number of
combined, or simultaneous attacks by the Bukharans and Ottomans in 1588, he said
that ‘Abdallah, whom he called ‘Usbech, re de' Tartari e signore di Samarcanda’, had
taken Khurasan in that year ‘sia per secreta intelligenza col Turco, sia per altre cause,
tutto ad un tempo che il Turco gli mosse guerra della parte verso i mezziogiorno,

quello dalla parte settentrionale gli levo il paese del Corasan’.?
Meanwhile,

in March

1586 two ambassadors from Khurasan

arrived in the

khanate. The years since 1583 had been very eventful for the governor of Herat. In

19 Materialy, 97-99. Opis’, 128.
20 More about this below.

21 Kusheva, 262. Abi ’1-Qasim, Majma‘, 114b-115a.
22 Aba ’1-Ghazi, tr. 274-5, text 257.
23 Alberi, serie III, volume II, 391-2.
51

‘Abdallah and ‘Abd al-Mu’min
that year Shah Muhammad Khudabanda marched against him, joining forces with the
governor of Mashhad, Murtada Quli. During the campaign “Ali Quli Khan nearly lost
Herat to Murtada Quli, but when he made his peace with his sovereign he was
allowed to retain his post as governor and his custody over Crown Prince ‘Abbas

Mirza whom he had virtually brought up and who was very fond of him. The Shah
also agreed to remove Murtada Quli from Khurasan altogether, but soon an even more
dangerous enemy appeared. An ambitious amir called Murshid Quli seized Mashhad,
then tried to persuade ‘Ali Quli to seize Astarabad and Bistam, and incorporate them
into Khurasan. When ‘Ali Quli refused, Murshid Quli took up arms against him, and

during a battle at Turshiz he captured ‘Abbas Mirza whom he took to Mashhad. After
this ‘Ali Quli's power declined considerably.24 Fearing that Murshid Quli might
attack again he appealed for help to ‘Abdallah and offered him the town of Herat. His
ambassadors, Pir Hajji Bik and ‘Ali Quli Bik Saruqchi, brought ‘Abdallah the keys of
the town, together with rich gifts. They also delivered a letter in which ‘Ali Quli Khan
pledged himself to serve ‘Abdallah faithfully, either as governor of Herat, or as
governor of any other town to which the khan might appoint him. “Abdallah, who
had decided to wait for Mir Quraish to return from India before he began the
campaign, took no immediate action. He held the Khurasani ambassadors back for
some time and then he sent them off with the capable qush begi Khwajam Qulli,
whom he asked to investigate the situation in Khurasan.?5
In 1585 or early 1586 a lavish embassy was despatched to Kashghariya to ask for
the surrender of the Suyinchid Prince, Mu’min Sultan, who had fled there in 1583.
‘Abd al-Karim, however, refused to oblige, and it took the ambassador much time,
much persuasive skill, and all his money in order to find out the fugitive's
whereabouts, after which he managed to have him put to death. When the ambassador
returned to the khanate in September 1586 ‘Abdallah was well pleased with his
achievement, but he was angry when he heard that ‘Abd al-Karim had been so unco-

operative, and he determined to take his revenge.”°
As the autumn came to an end ‘Abd al-Mu’ min became increasingly impatient to
start the Khurasan campaign, but his father refused to be rushed. When the young
man began to gather an army, he was ordered to stop his preparations and to wait in

Andkhud until the spring, for only then would the campaign begin.27 ‘Abdallah
himself showed no signs of impatience. He went hunting and gave orders for Qul
Baba Kukeltash to conduct a thorough enquiry into the condition of agriculture in the
vilayet of Samarqand and the amount of tax which that vilayet paid every year to his
Treasury.
In December he returned to Bukhara. Shortly afterwards he declared a holy war
on Iran, accusing the ‘Kafir’ Safawid rulers of Iran of oppressing local Sunnis, as
well as interfering with the caravans travelling to India and to the Holy Places. He
gave orders for an army to gather at Nesef in readiness for a spring campaign, and
Khwajah Sa‘d blessed the forthcoming campaign. When Khwajam Quli returned on 6
Rabi' I 996/14 February 1587 with more requests for help from ‘Ali Quli and further

tales of wrongdoing, ‘Abdallah became even more determined to take action.28

Before the end of February his army began to cross the Amu-Darya towards

24
25
26
27
28

Savory, History, 364-438.
Mirza Beg, 267. Hafiz Tanish, 239b. Iskandar Beg, 363.
Hafiz Tanish, 239b.
Tbid., 240a.
Tbid., 239b-4 1a.
52

1583-98

Khurasan, but “Abdallah went to Andijan to protect the eastern approaches of the
khanate and waited there for news of Mir Quraish. It is at about this time that a
mission from Samarqand may have been despatched to China. Nothing is known
about it, but it seems likely that horses and local produce were presented to the
Emperor, as in 1576 and 1581, for these missions were intended to foster goodwill
and trade, rather than diplomatic relations as such.29
In March ‘Abdallah heard that Amir Quraish was on his way to Kabul with an

ambassador from Akbar. This was encouraging news, but it required confirmation.
He despatched an envoy to Kabul for this purpose and also asked for the
ambassadors to be sent on to the khanate as soon as possible after they arrived. When
his envoy wrote that Amir Quraish had arrived in Kabul at last, and that he was
accompanied by two Mughal ambassadors, ‘Abdallah at once crossed the Syr-Darya

and set off towards Khurasan.3°
Mir Quraish's embassy had been very successful, despite the often-repeated
suggestion that the Emperor deliberately kept him waiting for an audience, whereas he
received the discredited ex-governor of Balkh at once. In fact Mir Quraish's audience
was not unduly delayed, and as for the former governor of Balkh, he had not lost
“Abdallah's favour, although he was in trouble with the religious authorities of the
khanate because of a dispute involving an endowment. According to ‘Abdallah's
biographer, Hafiz Tanish, the khan was sorry when Nazar Bi and his children were
ordered to leave the khanate on (an expiatory) pilgrimage. He hoped that in time
Nazar Bi would recover the possessions confiscated by the sadr,?! and in order to
show goodwill towards the former governor he directed him and his party to travel to
India with Mir Quraish. ‘Abdallah's regard for Nazar Bi was such that he even
entrusted the former official with a secret message for Akbar which seems to have
been delivered during an informal interview. ‘Abdallah announced that he was in full
control of the khanate, and that the Qazags, Qalmaq and Qirghiz were ‘obedient’ to
his orders. He added that he had tried, through Nazar Bi, to recall the Shi‘a of Iran to
the right path (of Sunnism). This approach having failed, he had instructed the
Khwarazmians to attack Nishapur and Astarabad, and the Manqits and Turkmen to
fall on Marw. He requested Akbar to join him in fighting the heretic Shi‘a and in

forcing them to return to the fold of Islam.32
‘Abdallah's letter is of great interest, both for what it says and for what it implies.
His statement that the Qazaqs, Qalmaq and Qirghiz were ‘obedient’ to him seems to
imply that they had all been hostile to him in the recent past and had perhaps all taken
part in Tawakkul's attack on the khanate. This, of course, would have been the case if
Tawakkul's brother Shah Muhammad (Ishim?), described in 1595 as the Qalmaq's
ruler, had already imposed his will upon them. ‘Abdallah's letter also shows that the
Khwarazmian Princes had remained on good terms with him. This is confirmed by
Muscovite contemporary sources which reveal that Hajjim Khan and his brother
Mahmid later sent 10,000 men to help ‘Abdallah with the siege of Herat and that in
retaliation Shah ‘Abbas forced Hajjim's son Muhammad Quli, who was living at the

29 Reischauer, 9. In 1587 Samarqand was mentioned among the 38 countries from the western

Regions which submitted tribute to the Emperor via Hami. See Mindai, 734, 736, for the
missions of 1576-7 and 1581-2.
30 Hafiz Tanish, 241b. It had taken them over five months to get to Kabul.

31 The official who administered endowments.
32 Nizamutdinov, Sredneaziatsko-indiiskie otnosheniya, 63.

‘Abdallah and ‘Abd al-Mu’min

reward.33

Finally, ‘Abdallah's letter makes clear, both that Marw was in Iranian hands, and
that his good relations with the Noghays (Mangits) had been restored by the time his
envoys left for India in the autumn of 1585, although earlier that year the Noghay
envoys to Moscow had complained that they were having to go about ‘naked’ because
of a trade boycott imposed upon them by ‘Abdallah. The improvement in NoghayBukharan relations did not last long, however. A few months later, in 1586 in an

effort to harm ‘Abdallah's relations with Muscovy, the Noghays would allege that
after exchanging embassies with Turkey he wanted to ‘unite under one ruler the
Volga, the Crimea and Kafu’34
But to return to Mir Quraish. Far from trying to insult him, Akbar had sent a
detachment of his own bodyguard to escort him and his party, although he knew full
well that they would be under attack in the Khyber Pass and would have to fight
against the local Tariki tribesmen in order to get through. When Mir Quraish crossed
the Indus and reached the ‘sarai of Khairabad’ on 27 February 1586, he was indeed
kept waiting 13 days for an audience with the Emperor, but this was only because a
suitable chamber was being built for the purpose at Rohtas on the Jhelum. He was
then treated with great kindness and dismissed less than six months later in the
company of two Mughal ambassadors, one of whom, Hakim Humam, was a
personal friend of Akbar, while the other, Miran Sadr Jahan, was a Husaini sayyid, a

mufti, and a chief judge.35
In the letters which Mir Quraish delivered to Akbar, ‘Abdallah had tried to show

that he had been compelled to conquer Badakhshan by Shahrukh's behaviour.
Shahrukh, he explained, had given refuge to several rebels from the khanate. He had
attacked Balkh when he knew that ‘Abdallah was occupied in taking Turkestan and

‘destroying’ the Qazaqs and other tribes from the Qipchaq steppes. And yet when
‘Abdallah marched to teach him a lesson, Shahrukh fled, leaving him with no option

but to take Badakhshan. ‘Abdallah hoped that his friendship with Akbar would not
suffer as a result and, because he knew that Akbar loved flying pigeons, he was
sending him some choice pigeons from Farghana. In another, rather ambiguous letter,
paraphrased by Hafiz Tanish, ‘Abdallah claimed that the Sunnis of Badakhshan had
been harassed by Shi‘a factions on orders from Iran, and he announced his intention
of marching the following spring. Although he did not specify where he was
intending to march, he asked Akbar not to give asylum or help to any who might flee
from his army. Finally, he appears to have questioned the soundness of Akbar's
commitment to orthodox Islam.37
Akbar answered ‘Abdallah's letters in full with a very friendly missive, although,
as will be seen, his friendliness was not genuine. ‘Abdallah must have been flattered
that this missive was entrusted to two high-ranking officials, but he cannot have been
pleased to realise that both of them were leading exponents of Akbar's new religion,
33 Kazakhsko-russkie otnosheniya, 3. Pamyatniki, XX, 111.

34 Pekarskii, 10-11. Kusheva, 262.
35 Abii ’I-Fadl, Akbarnama, III, 479, 486-7, 496-7. See glossary for the meaning of sayyid.
36 Bhagchand, 199b-201a. The latter part of this statement was incorrect for 'Abdallah besieged and
took Turkestan in 1582 from Uzbeg rebels and not from the Qazaqs, who were then his allies.

‘Abdallah may have said this for effect, in the belief that a reference to foreign aggression by the
Qazaqs would impress Akbar more than an admission of internal rebellion in the khanate. None of
this is confirmed by Hafiz Tanish, although he mentions vaguely (211a) that Shahrukh attacked
the khanate repeatedly after attacking Balkh in 1579.

37 Hafiz Tanish, 239a.

1583-98

the din-i ilahi, which has been described as ‘monotheism with a tinge of pantheism,
practical deification of the Emperor as viceregent of God.... (furthering) the adoption
of Hindu, Jain and Parsi practices while discouraging or positively prohibiting
essential Muslim rites’
3° In the circumstances Akbar's strong rejection of the charges
of heresy and protestations that his sole desire was to follow the ‘straight path of
religion’ were less than convincing. It was perhaps significant of his deviationist
views that in his defence Akbar compared himself both to God and to the Prophet
Muhammad, saying: ‘of God it was said he had a son, of the Prophet that he was a
sorcerer, if neither God nor the Prophet escaped the slander of men, how can I?’
‘Abdallah, whose punctiliousness in matters of religion led him to ban the study of
logic and dialectic as dangerous, cannot have liked the hint of megalomania contained
in this statement. But he would have been more impressed by Akbar's assurances
that he had turned numerous churches and temples into mosques, and that his ultimate
aim was to rid the islands around India of all Firangi infidels.
Akbar turned next to the subject of Iran. Although he made no direct reference to
‘Abdallah's suggestion for joint action, as conveyed by Nazar Bi, he obviously
approved of it. And in fact the time seemed ideal for an attack on Iran. Muhammad
Khudabanda, who had proved not only incompetent, but also lazy and unable to rule
firmly and consistently, had delegated most of his power to his son Hamza in 1585.
But Hamza was not universally accepted. The governor of Mashhad, in particular,
refused to obey orders. He would not give up his trump card, 15-year-old ‘Abbas
Mirza, whom he was hoping to place on the throne. A rebellion by the Turkmen and
Takkali tribes had broken out in 1585. At about the same time the ancient capital of
Tabriz had been lost to the Ottomans and Hamza was still struggling unsuccessfully
with both problems in 1586. In the circumstances Akbar, as before, posed as the
supporter of the Safawids. He explained that he had thought of appointing one of his
sons (to Iran) in view of the disloyalty and improper behaviour (of Iranian officials).
However, he had changed his mind on hearing that the Ottomans had broken their
earlier agreements with the father and grandfather of the present Safawid ruler and
that they had launched several attacks on the country to take advantage of its

weakness. He would therefore overlook the Safawids' deviation from the true path of
Sunnism and go to their assistance. He advised ‘Abdallah to meet him ‘in that
country’ to discuss the strengthening of their loving links .and to discuss religious
matters, a vague suggestion which ‘Abdallah was no doubt expected to interpret as
tacit approval of his plans.
With reference to ‘Abdallah's allegedly involuntary conquest of Badakhshan,
Akbar professed himself delighted with the explanation of the circumstances leading
up to it. Shahrukh, he agreed, had acted improperly, but his youth was to blame for
his disobedient, ‘unbecoming’ and ‘improper’ behaviour towards “Abdallah, Mirza
Sulaiman and himself. He hoped that ‘Abdallah would forgive the young man as he
had done.4° Akbar added that he was delighted with the pigeons sent to him by
‘Abdallah, for when he looked at their beauty and grace he felt as if he were
contemplating God. He said nothing about ‘Abdallah's other gifts - hunting-birds,
greyhounds, fleet camels and horses - for they obviously meant less to him than the
pigeons. Finally Akbar introduced his ambassadors. Miran Sadr Jahan Pihani was
38 CHI, IV, 131.
39 Aba ’l-Fadl, ‘Ain, 468. Aba ’Il-Fadl, Akbarnama, III, 498. Abi °1-Qadir, III, 150.
40 At 28 Shahrukh was far younger than either ‘Abdallah, who was 54 or Akbar, who was 45.

‘Abdallah and ‘Abd al-Mu’min

bringing belated condolences on Iskandar's death. Hakim Humam was a very close
friend whose advice Akbar often took. ‘Abdallah should speak to him as to the

Emperor himself.4!
This letter was delivered to ‘Abdallah in October 1587 in Herat. He had arrived
there in June, having found out in May that ‘Ali Quli had changed his mind and
decided to defend the town against him. Not only had “Ali Quli fortified Herat in
preparation for a siege, he had also appealed to ‘Abbas Mirza for help.4* However,
when ‘Abdallah arrived, he sent him friendly messages to try and gain time. But he
was doubly disappointed when no help was sent from Mashhad, and ‘Abdallah
pressed on with the siege, ignoring his messages. ‘Abbas Mirza failed to respond to
the appeal from his former guardian not because he was unwilling to help him, for he
was still very attached to him, but because he could do nothing without the approval
and support of his all-powerful protector, Murshid Quli, and Murshid Quli was
determined not to help his rival. However, he promised to intervene and even put out
a rumour that ‘Abbas Mirza and he were on their way to reinforce the garrison of
Herat. But instead of marching south-east to Herat, they marched north-west to the
Iranian capital of Qazwin. There ‘Abbas Mirza was warmly welcomed and by 16

October 1587 he had replaced his father on the throne under the name of ‘Abbas I.49
Meanwhile the siege of Herat was pursued vigorously. “Abdallah took the outer
parts of the town, many battles were fought with the defenders, several forts in the
area were seized, together with the town of Ghuriyan. Most of the people of the
vilayet fled in fear of forced conversion. Some even got as far as Qandahar where
“Abdallah's soldiers compelled them to fight, taking many prisoners and rich booty,
including a large number of much-prized Damask steel swords.44
During this period there was trouble in the khanate. Some of ‘Abdallah's subjects
took advantage of his absence in Khurasan to rebel, and the Qirghiz marched on
Hisar. The longest and most dangerous rebellion took place in an area traditionally
controlled by the Suyunchids. The people of Shahrukhiya and Khujand rose up in the
spring of 1587 and then assembled at Pskent, together with rebels from the Tashkent
vilayet. There they chose a Qazaq Prince who closely resembled ‘Abdallah's former
enemy, Baba Sultan, and elected him as ruler under that name. After killing some of
Uzbeg Sultan's representatives in that town,45 in late Rajab/3 July 1587 a force of
over 3,000 rebels set off for Tashkent. Although the governor of Tashkent, Uzbeg
Sultan, had a mere 500 men to oppose them, he came out to fight, putting them to
flight on 27 Rajab/3 July. The following day, with reinforcements brought over by
his son Hazara and his cousin Isfandiyar,4® he set off after them and inflicted a
second defeat upon them at Sairam. They then fled to the Qipchaq steppes, but the
rebellion was not yet fully over.
The rebels came back to attack Turkestan and Sabran with the support of two
Suyunchid Princes and two sons of the former Qazaq ruler Haqq Nazar. The Qazaq

41 Aba ’1-Fadl, Akbarnama, Ill, 497-500.
42 Hafiz Tanish, 244a-b. Mirza Beg, 268a. Iskandar Beg, 363.
43 Savory, History, 505-14, 512-3. Iskandar Beg, 381.
44 Hafiz Tanish, 244a-8b.
45 Mc Chesney, "The Conquest", 97, claims that these were tax-gatherers (‘ummdl) but this word

has not been found in Or 3497 where the people killed are described as some people/envoys sent

by Uzbeg Sultan (chandi az nawwab Uzbeg Sultan).

46 Note the relationship of these two Princes to Uzbek Sultan, which is incorrectly set out by Mc
Chesney (ibid.).

1583-98
intervention could have been serious, but, fortunately, the Princes involved were not

as capable as Tawakkul. By late Ramadan/early September 1587 the rebels and their
allies had been crushed and scattered, and one of the Suyunchid Princes had been put

to death.4” At about the same time, forgetting their earlier protestations of friendship,
the Qirghiz marched on Hisar from Qarategin, and in Badakhshan a certain Shah
Nizam marched on Taligan.

Neither of these attacks was serious, however, and order was soon restored in the

khanate, much to ‘Abdallah's satisfaction.
Meanwhile Akbar's ambassadors reached Herat and were granted an audience.
‘Abdallah had every reason to be gratified, for the Mughal envoys showed him the
greatest respect.48The audience took place in the medresseh Sultan Husain Mirza.
When they entered the ambassadors saw ‘Abdallah sitting on a throne painted with
gold-leaf, surrounded by his amirs who were seated in order of precedence. A group
of officials stood in the audience chamber, wearing robes decorated with gold and
pearls, and carrying staffs made of silver and gold. This was such an impressive sight
that when they were told to present their respects in the fashion adopted at Akbar's
Court, Hakim Humam was carried away and performed no less than 27 taslim, i.e.
he put his hand on the floor and then held it above his head 27 times before
advancing, head bowed, towards ‘Abdallah. Then he knelt down, kissed ‘Abdallah's

hand and gave him Akbar's letter. The Emperor's presents were brought in next and,
to the ambassadors' amazement, ‘Abdallah at once gave them away to his officials

and amirs, although they were apparently worth 150,000 rupees.49 Overcome with
admiration, the Mughal envoys realised that ‘Abdallah was a monarch of great stature,
and not the petty ruler whom they had expected to meet.
During the following three weeks the ambassadors called on Abd al-Mu’min and
were splendidly entertained by each of the major amirs in turn. Rich gifts were
exchanged on these occasions, the amirs' presents ranging from horses, camels and
mules with gold trappings to slaves, and Qul Baba Kukeltash received 45 robes and
other presents sent to him by Akbar's favourite, Hakim Abu ’1-Fath, who was also
Hakim Humam's brother.°°
On 21 October the ambassadors were sent on to Bukhara to wait for the siege to
come to an end. The chief qadi of the town looked after them, putting them up in a
comfortable and attractive house, and providing them with a food and money
allowance.>! They remained there until their dismissal in late August or early
September 1589, when they set off in the company of a new Bukharan envoy to
India, the ataliq Ahmad ‘Ali. During their lengthy stay they would have had a good
opportunity to study the minds of ‘Abdallah's subjects and to make enquiries about
the strength and wealth of the khanate. Hakim Humam probably acquired the
illuminated manuscript about Akbar's ancestor, Mirza Husain Baiqara, and the
specialist book about pigeons which the Emperor had particularly asked for.52 He
also held talks with ‘Abdallah, as a result of which it was agreed that the Hindu Kush
and Qandahar should form the frontier between the khanate and India.
Although the treaty as such has not survived, it was to remain the basis of the
47
48
49
50
51
52

He was ‘Adil Sultan, son of Amin Sultan.
Thid., 249a-50b
Thid., 250b-1a. Aba ’1-Qadir, II, 354.
Hafiz Tanish, 251a. Hakim, 4a.
Hafiz Tanish, 251a.
Hakim, 20a.

‘Abdallah and ‘Abd al-Mu’min

khans' relations with Mughal India for the next 40 years and it established good
relations between Akbar and ‘Abdallah. By 1587 Akbar had realised the strength of
‘Abdallah's character. He knew his neighbour to be as capable as he was persistent
and, although prepared to accept the annexation of Badakhshan, he was determined
that ‘Abdallah should advance no further in the east. Akbar was so keen to achieve an
agreement with the Bukharan ruler that he was even prepared to abandon his plans for
‘touring Turan’, i.e., attacking the khanate, an admission which made a mockery of
his earlier protestations of friendship for ‘Abdallah! This was mentioned in a letter to
Hakim Humam and the ambassador was told that if such an agreement was achieved
Akbar would ‘turn his stirrups (instead) towards the islands of Faranj’, by which he
meant Goa, Cambay and Caman. The treaty laid down that ‘Abdallah would not try
and conquer the province of Kabul. In return he would have carte blanche in
Khurasan, Sistan, and even Zamindawar. The fate of Qandahar was less clear,
although it was probably assumed that the Mughals would eventually rule over this

town which they had lost it to Iran in 1556. 53
Herat fell on 5 (Rabi‘II) 996/4 March 1588.54 The siege had lasted nearly ten
months. The defenders had shown great courage in the face of constant attacks.
Illness and starvation had taken their toll, forcing ‘Ali Quli to sue for peace after nine
months. According to ‘Abdallah's biographer this was refused because one of
‘Abdallah's religious advisers forecast that victory would be theirs on the fifth of
Jumada. On that day only 50 to 80 defenders were left who had sought refuge in the
fort Ikhtiyar al-Din. When they ran out of ammunition they gave themselves up, but
only on condition that their lives would be spared. After this was agreed they were
made to give up their weapons and were taken to pay their respects to ‘Abd alMu’ min. At this stage, either owing to a misunderstanding or to a silly taunt by one of
the Bukharans, who tugged at the turban of a captive, a fight broke out, in the course
of which all the captives were killed. This regrettable incident is portrayed in the
worst possible light by Shah “‘Abbas's biographer, Iskandar Beg. He says that the
massacre was planned by ‘Abd al-Mu’min and that it was followed by the wholesale

slaughter of all the Qizilbash,>> the torturing of their wives and the killing of many of
the townspeople, on orders from ‘Abdallah. In fact it would appear that although
there was much pillage and slaughter when the town fell, this was stopped on the

third day either by ‘Abd al-Mu’min or by his father.56
“Abdallah, who had been hunting in Ghuriyan when Herat fell, rewarded his son
generously by giving him the whole of Badakhshan to govern, in addition to the
province of Balkh. But the young man was disappointed not to receive Herat. The
post of governor was given instead to his father's foster brother, Qul Baba
Kukeltash, who was a scholarly man, more conciliating and more moderate in his
religious ardour than the Prince, and who apparently achieved success in the difficult
task of reconciling the population to its new masters.
53 Aba ’1-Fadl, Mukdtabat, 197. See Hajji Mir, 134b, 138b, for two references to the terms of the
treaty. See Kamgar Husaini, 224a, for Akbar's and ‘Abdallah's intentions with regard to Iran.

54 Not as given in Burton, “The fall”, due to the mis-reading of an earlier date in the manuscript.
55 See glossary for this word. See also Savory, Iran, 19-20, 31-32.

56 Hafiz Tanish, 255b-7b. Mirza Beg, 276a, says 660 were killed in the affray, and 'Abdallah was
very upset about this. Sharaf al-Din, II 288-9. Iskandar Beg, 388, 387, claims that 'Ali Quli sent

envoys in the seventh month whom ‘Abdallah had shot back at him from Bukharan guns, a
gruesome story not confirmed elsewhere. Qadi Ahmad, 29, says all the women and children of the

town were sold into slavery. Hafiz Tanish, 259b, says the ‘ulama’ of the khanate gave specific
permission for this, but does not specify whether or not this was done.

1583-98

‘Abdallah himself remained in Khurasan another four and a half months, during
which time he made an attempt at taking Mashhad. He began by ravaging the
countryside around the town but he was not keen to begin another major siege at this
stage, especially as there were rumours that Akbar had attacked the khanate and that
‘Abbas was on his way to Khurasan with fresh troops. When the governor offered to
surrender Mashhad the following spring if the Shah's army failed to reach the
province by then, ‘Abdallah, who had made no appreciable progress after two
months, was glad to accept the offer. He returned to Herat, celebrated the end of the
month of the Fast (23 August), and then took his army back to the khanate. A
garrison of 2,000 was left in Herat, and troops were sent to the south and south-east
to make a bid for the town of Fara and the province of Sistan.57
But what had happened to the Iranian relief army, and why, nearly a year after his
coronation, had “Abbas I still not reached Khurasan? There were several reasons for

his delay. First, Murshid Quli had decided to strengthen ‘Abbas's position. After
eliminating every unreliable amir and arranging for the young man to marry two close
relatives, an aunt and a sister-in-law (Hamza's widow), in quick succession, he

placed the young man's father and the new Regent, his brother Abi Talib, under
guard. Secondly, the whole process of gathering an army took time and Murshid Quli
did his best to slow this down. Thirdly, when the army was ready it turned out to be

too big and cumbersome to move quickly.>8 Finally, although ‘Abbas was eager to
get to Herat, his eagerness was tempered by his determination to recruit supporters on
whom he might safely rely to rid him of Murshid Quli and his intolerable domination.
When Shah ‘Abbas set off from Qazwin at last, in late March 1588, he already

knew that Herat had fallen and that he would have to retake the town.°? But although
he hoped to stop ‘Abdallah making further conquests, he was unable to hurry to
Khurasan. First he had to dispose of Murshid Quli, and, after many secret meetings

with his supporters, he finally persuaded them to assassinate his hated protector.
Murshid Quli's death, however, did not make much difference to the speed of the
march, for the Shah had to spend six weeks in Isfara’in waiting for the remainder of
the Iranian army to gather. When he at last reached Mashhad in the autumn, ‘Abbas
appointed Budagh Khan as governor, but his nominee fled shortly afterwards because
he was related to the former governor, Murshid Quli, whose supporters were being
eliminated by the Shah. ‘Ummat Khan was then appointed in his place and, after
nominating governors to several other towns in the province, Shah ‘Abbas prepared
to march on Herat, where, according to Muscovite

sources, Iranian troops had

mounted a siege with no apparent success. At this stage he was told that the Ottomans
had attacked in the west, taking the province of Qarabagh near the Caspian and
marching south as far as Hamadan. These attacks, no doubt planned to coincide with
‘Abdallah's campaign and with ‘Abbas's absence from Iran proper, were as
unexpected as they were serious. “Abbas was now needed in Iran, and in any case he
was unlikely to succeed against Herat, for he had no artillery or siege-train. There
was also little hope of obtaining adequate food-supplies for his men in the devastated
area around the town, and fresh troops from the khanate were more than likely to
attack his tired soldiers in the spring. ‘Abbas therefore decided to give up his
57 Iskandar Beg, 389-90, says that after leaving Mashhad ‘Abdallah first went to Sarakhs, which he
besieged unsuccessfully. After sustaining heavy casualties he retired, but promised to return.
Pamyatniki, XX, 109-10. Sharaf al-Din, II, 290. Qadi Ahmad, 28-29. Shah Husain, 267-8.

58 Iskandar Beg, 362, 380, 386. Savory, History, 549. Sharaf al-Din, II, 291.
59 Qadi Ahmad, 28, says he heard the news as early as 18 Rabi‘II/17 March 1588.
59

‘Abdallah and ‘Abd al-Mu’min

undertaking and returned to Qazwin where he arrived in March 1589.60
Meanwhile on ‘Abdallah's return to Bukhara, he despatched ambassadors to
Muscovy, Turkey and India to spread abroad the news of his conquest of Herat. His
ambassador to Muscovy was none other than Muhammad ‘Ali, who had already been
there in 1585. Muhammad ‘Ali arrived on 28 February 1589, having travelled via the
Caspian with an ambassador from ‘Abd al-Mu’min called Dosum (Dustum) and an
ambassador from the Khwarazmian Prince Mahmid of Wazir called Kadish. He
showed great energy in defending his rights, and also those of ordinary Bukharans
trading in Muscovy. He also wrote repeatedly to the Tsar exposing local abuses and
malpractices, and demanding redress. He was very confident, as befitted the envoy of
the conqueror of Herat, and no doubt because he knew the value which the Muscovite

rulers attached to trade, he complained bitterly to Tsar Fedor about the crew of the
Russian boat (the busa) which plied twice yearly across the Caspian to Astrakhan.
Their demands for bribes amounted to unlawful taxation on the goods of merchants,

he wrote, and this had led many a Central Asian to take his trade away from Muscovy
to Turkey, Iran or even the Noghays!
Muhammad ‘Ali also lodged a complaint against the Customs officials of Kazan’
who had asked for dues to be paid on the khaqan's goods. They expected him to pay
when he returned to the town and had taken two of his men as surety. This, he
argued, was against all precedent, and he won his case. Tsar Fedor ruled that neither
the Bukharan nor the Russian goods carried by Muhammad ‘Ali should pay any dues,
and he ordered the governor (voevoda) of Kazan' not to cause the ambassador any
delay on his return journey.
It should be mentioned that ambassadors generally doubled up as traders at that
time, and that their duties included selling and purchasing goods for their royal
patrons. The royal trade was particularly profitable, because royal goods were exempt
from trade and Customs dues, and through their envoys and royal traders (kupchina)
tulers could acquire rare goods, and also goods which were not generally available on
the open market (zapovednye tovary).
This trade was substantial, as can be seen by the large quantities of goods which
Muhammad ‘Ali and Dustum took back - some 5,400 kg of wax, 1,100 kg of honey,
700 hides. They also bought squirrel pelts, 10 suits of armour, 15 slaves and 982
litres of wine, a rather surprising item for the representatives of two strict Sunni
Princes to carry!
It is not known what gifts they took the Tsar, but Tsar Fedor presented the three

ambassadors with 10 gerfalcons for their masters and also allowed them to purchase a
total of 25 birds of prey, including a number of gerfalcons. The gerfalcon was a rare
and delicate bird, mainly found in Siberia, which was much valued for its ability to

hunt most animals, form hares to eagles, excepting only the wild boar. Furthermore,
and although silver was very scarce in Muscovy, the Tsar agreed to let Muhammad
‘Ali take back 1,000 silver coins which ‘Abdallah had requested, saying that he
needed them in order to buy silver dishes.°! Tsar Fedor's generosity was indicative
of his goodwill, goodwill which had endured despite the offence caused by the
wording of “Abdallah's letter. His sense of grievance was made abundantly clear in
the official letter (gramota) taken to ‘Abdallah by Baibiryi Taishev who accompanied
Muhammad ‘Ali on his return journey to Bukhara by land. The Tsar had been

60 Iskandar Beg, 401-4. Pamyatniki, XX, 110, 79. Sharaf al-Din, II, 290.
61 Materialy, 101-6. The Khwarazmian envoy also took back wine, hides and slaves.

1583-98

offended by the ‘unseemly’ way in which his title had been abridged in the khan's
letter. Always conscious of their dignity, the Tsars in general, and Fedor I in
particular, were keen that a long list of their titles and possessions should follow any
mention of their names. This greatly irritated Queen Elizabeth in her dealings with
Moscow, but she felt obliged to humour the Tsars in all her communications. It
seems, however, that on this occasion ‘Abdallah had addressed Fedor as ‘the White
Tsar’, whereas the correct title should have been ‘ruler and autocrat and Grand Prince
of all the Russias, ruler of Vladimir, Moscow, Novgorod, Kazan’, Astrakhan,
Pskov, Smolensk’ and another 16 towns and provinces. In his letter the Tsar
demanded that the proper form of address be used in future, and he made it clear that
only the intercession of his brother-in-law, the Grand Equerry Boris Godunov, had
saved ‘Abdallah's envoy from paying the price for this gratuitous offence.
However, although the Tsar had granted Muhammad ‘Ali's requests and had even
sent an envoy to ‘Abdallah, relations with Muscovy were slightly strained as a result.
There was certainly an element of suspicion in the Tsar's attitude towards Muhammad
“Ali and his fellow Central Asian ambassadors. He not only listed the items which
they were permitted to purchase, he also required officials to check that they took no
more than the listed quantities of goods. Furthermore, although German slaves were
included in their list, he stressed that the ambassadors should be prevented from

obtaining Russians in exchange for German slaves, and that the purchase of
‘christened’ German slaves was strictly forbidden.
This mention of ‘christened’ Germans appears to reflect not so much suspicion of
Muslims as an enduring hatred on the part of the Orthodox for any exponents of the
Catholic doctrine. They remembered that the Crusaders had sacked the Orthodox
churches in Constantinople in 1204, and believed that all Catholics, from the Teutonic
Knights in the thirteenth century to the Jesuits in the sixteenth century, were
determined to achieve ‘the reduction of the Russian schismatics to the jurisdiction of
the Pope’.® As a result, Catholics, and worse still, Protestants, were considered in
Moscow as pagans, not worthy of protection, but Germans ‘christened’ (into the
Orthodox faith) ranked as Christians, and were not to be sold into slavery.
While Muhammad ‘Ali was in Muscovy ‘Abdallah's ambassador to Murad III
reached Istanbul in March 1589 and met with a frosty reception. The Venetian
ambassador, Bassa, even had to intervene to secure him an invitation to a banquet and

a chance to kiss the Sultan's hand. It is not known what had happened to sour
relations, but two rather contradictory explanations can be offered for Murad III's
change of heart. On the one hand he was disappointed that ‘Abdallah returned to the
khanate after taking Herat instead of keeping ‘Abbas I occupied in Khurasan, as this
would have helped the Ottoman campaign. On the other hand he was displeased by
the knowledge that ‘Abdallah had taken Herat and was planning future conquests in
Khurasan, for there was a real danger that if he proved more successful than the

Ottomans against Iran, his fame would eclipse that of Murad III in the eyes of the

Muslim world.
Akbar's reaction to ‘Abdallah's success at Herat is not recorded. However, from

the spring of 1588 his armies had been very busy in the frontier region between
Ghazni and Chitral, east of the Hindu Kush. This led to a rumour, reported by the

64 TsGADA, fond no. 109 op.1, 1589 no 1, listy 1-5.
65 Ware, 68-70, 92, 104-5.
66 Hammer, Histoire, VII, 196.
61

‘Abdallah and ‘Abd al-Mu’min

Tsar's envoys to Iran, that Akbar had attacked the khanate during ‘Abdallah's absence
in Khurasan. In late August 1589 Akbar himself made his way towards Kabul to
supervise operations against the Tariki and other Afghan tribesmen of the area, and
this appears to have worried ‘Abdallah who, as mentioned above, left Khurasan to
return to the khanate. He then dismissed Hakim Humam and sent with him a new
envoy to Akbar, the ataliq Ahmad ‘Ali who reached Kabul in early October. The text
of the letter or letters which he entrusted to the two men has unfortunately not
survived. But according to Abi ’1-Fadl's paraphrase of them it seems that ‘Abdallah
began by flattering Akbar, attributing his success against Herat to Akbar's approval of
the campaign. ‘Abdallah then apparently expressed concern at Akbar's strong military
presence in the Punjab. And Akbar responded by moving away from the frontier on
25 November, i.e., seven weeks after Ahmad ‘Ali's arrival, ‘out of compassion’ for

the people of the khanate, who had been ‘confused’ by his might. This was no more
than a gesture, however, for instead of leaving the Punjab altogether, Akbar remained
there for several more years.
Finally ‘Abdallah wrote that he would await the dismissal of his ambassador
before proceeding further on an ‘indispensable matter’, probably a hint that he would
continue his conquest in Khurasan after Akbar signed the agreement about their
common boundary. But Akbar, who later wrote that he had understood (what that
meant), took no notice of this part of the letter.6> Instead he kept Ahmad ‘Ali in India
for so long that the difference in climate and in food had time to act adversely on him,
and he died in December 1590. Akbar was not happy for ‘Abdallah's power to
increase unduly. He must have been concerned to know that the chief of the Tarik1,
Jalala, who had attacked his troops and caused him problems in the area of Ghuri and
the Khyber Pass, had recently fled for refuge to the khanate. He was also keenly
aware that a serious rebellion had broken out in Badakhshan in autumn 1589 which
might well lead to a re-drawing of the map of the khanate. In the circumstances, he

had decided to wait before ratifying the boundary treaty.®
Before looking into the Badakhshan rebellion we must first return to the khanate,

where “Abdallah and his army were resting after the capture of Herat. The people of
the khanate and their religious leaders were delighted with the success of the
campaign, for not only had territory been acquired, but Herat had been brought back
into the Sunni fold. Khwajah Sa‘d's general satisfaction was increased when he was
given the numerous plots of land in and around the town which had once belonged to

his mother's father, Muhammad Taman.®? And among ‘Abdallah's neighbours, the
Qalmagq, Qirghiz and Kashghariyans thought it wise to send him their congratulations.
“Abd al-Karim of Kashghariya was especially anxious that his brother Quraish,
whom he had sent off into exile and who was travelling to Mecca via India, should
receive no support from ‘Abdallah. Quraish Sultan, who was the governor of
Khotan, had rebelled against ‘Abd al-Karim in 1587-8. Later he fled from his
sovereign's wrath to Jalish and Turfan which he appears to have seized with the help
of the Qirghiz, but he did not remain there for long. ‘Abd al-Karim sent his brother
Muhammad against him and Muhammad succeeded, after a three-month struggle, in
taking Quraish prisoner. When Quraish arrived in Yarkand he was pardoned, but he
was subsequently sent into exile with seven of his sons, an exception being made in
65 Aba ’1-Fadl, Akbarnama, III, 566, 569, 706-7, 531.
66 [bid., 582, 531, 576 and ff.
67 Akhmedov, “Rol”’, 21, 18.

1583-98

the case of Khudabanda, who was married to Muhammad's daughter and who was
allowed to remain in Kashghariya. In view of ‘Abd al-Karim's embassy, ‘Abdallah
did not intervene in the dispute, but he invited Quraish Sultan to travel through Balkh.
Quraish did so circa June 1589 and his account of Muhammad's harshness and
injustice may have encouraged ‘Abdallah to intervene in Kashghariya some years
later, in favour of Muhammad's rivals to the throne.7°
Some time before Quraish's arrival ‘Abdallah and his son launched their second
expedition into Khurasan. The time seemed ripe for an attack. The province had not
yet recovered from the Bukharan campaign of 1588. Shah ‘Abbas's failure to besiege
Herat and his return to Qazwin had disappointed the highly independent amirs of
Khurasan. Disaffection was rife. Budagh Khan was planning to wrest Mashhad from
‘Ummat Khan, in order to rule there in the name of ‘Abbas's infant son. Others were
proposing that the Safawid Prince of Zamindawar, Rustam Mirza, should take charge
of Khurasan.
“Abdallah decided to make a bid for Mashhad, the second major town of the

province, and a particularly holy place for the Shi‘a because it contained the shrine of
the eighth Caliph, Imam Rida. He would have liked to take the town himself, but he
delegated the task to “Abd al-Mu’min, so that the glory and success would be entirely
his son's. The military expertise and stamina which the Prince had shown outside
Herat made him eminently fit for the task, and ‘Abdallah hoped that the incipient rift
between them would be healed if the young man was allowed to keep the fruits of this
expedition. “Abd al-Mu’min accordingly set off for Khurasan, where he arrived in the
spring of 1589. While he was waiting for the reinforcements which his father had
ordered from his cousin Din Muhammad and from Qul Baba Kiukeltash, the Prince
decided to make a bid for Nishapur, this town being smaller than Mashhad and less
well fortified. However, in a first skirmish many of his men were taken prisoner. The
Iranian governor of the town then entered into negotiations with him and suggested
that he should concentrate instead on taking Mashhad, for this was the main town of
the district, and whoever controlled it would also control Nishapur. This seemed a
sensible plan, and when the governor offered to return his Bukharan prisoners if
‘Abd al-Mu’min left for Mashhad, the Prince raised the siege and marched to
Mashhad.
The siege of Mashhad began on 2 Jumada II/18 April, shortly after “Abd alMu’min's reinforcements

arrived. The town

held out for five months,

despite

repeated attacks by the assailants, and was taken by storm on 20 Dhu ’1-qa‘da/30
September 1589.7! As in the case of Herat the townspeople had appealed to Shah
‘Abbas for help, but once again he was too late. Although he had marched a short
distance out of Qazwin on 21 Shawwal/2 September, or nearly a month before the fall
of Mashhad, he wasted ten days waiting for the rest of his army to assemble, and
shortly afterwards he fell ill. Realising full well that for reasons of prestige the
campaign could not be abandoned he sent his men ahead, promising to join them as
soon as he recovered. But they did not hurry and they had only got as far as Damghan
in Qumas when they were told that Mashhad had fallen.
The siege had cost many lives and ‘Abd al-Mu’min was determined to avenge his
dead. This determination, coupled with his religious fanaticism, resulted in the brutal

70 Muhammad Yusuf Munshi, 238a. Shah Mahmiid, 165n. Aba ’1-Fadl, Akbarnama, III, 556, says
thatit was Khudabanda who rebelled, but if that were so, then Khudabanda, and not his father and
brothers, would have been exiled.

71 Sharaf al-Din, II, 292. Qadi Ahmad, 51.
63

‘Abdallah and ‘Abd al-Mu’min

massacre of the people of Mashhad. His army was allowed to kill and loot
unchecked, and not even those descendants of the Prophet who sought refuge by the
shrine of Imam Rida were spared. Some 5,700 are said to have been killed before his
cousin, Din Muhammad,

persuaded the Prince to call an end to the massacre.

should not be thought, however, that Din Muhammad's intervention was purely
altruistic: he had been offered the considerable worldly goods of the guardian of the
shrine, together with his sister's hand in marriage, in return for his intercession.
By the time the massacre ended the town was devastated: enormous quantities of
books, chandeliers, jewellery, money donated by pilgrims, and even the golden spire
of Imam Rida's shrine were taken as booty to the khanate. ‘Abd al-Mu’min's thirst
for vengeance did not even spare the dead: seeking out the tomb of Shah Tahmasp he
had his bones disinterred and burnt, thus avenging at last Muhammad Shaibani's illtreatment at the hands of Tahmasp's father.”2 The campaign ended with the capture of
a number of towns situated between Herat and Mashhad, as well as Nishapur and
Turshiz. ‘Abd al-Mu’min now controlled an area some 150 miles wide and 50 miles
long, which he was determined to increase in the near future. After appointing
governors to the conquered towns and to those as yet unconquered, he returned to the

khanate to bask there in praise and adulation.” °,
He also wrote to the Sultan and told him in detail about the recent Bukharan
successes in Khurasan. Recalling their common interest in ridding the planet of the
Qizilbash (heretics) and in clearing the route to the pilgrimage, he began by
mentioning the capture of Herat, the crushing of the Turkestan rebellion and the
numerous embassies received in the khanate following these successes. Turning next
to the siege of Mashhad, he explained that he had spared neither young nor old. He
had burnt the bones of Shah Tahmasp in order to purify the air round the sanctuary of
Imam Rida, while also cleansing the town as a whole from the ‘rust of wickedness’
and heresy. He said that he had taken Turshiz, Isfara’in and other towns, and even
alleged that he had sent soldiers as far as Tabriz, a statement which must have alarmed
Murad III, since he considered this town as being in his own sphere of influence.
‘Abd al Mu’min finally declared his intention of marching against Iran proper the
following spring, with the help and support of the Princes of Khwarazm, who had

rallied to him.”4
‘Abd al-Mu’min was referring to the action taken by Nar Muhammad Khan of
Marw during the siege of Mashhad. Nur Muhammad, who was the adopted son of
“Abdallah's late brother-in-law Aba ’1-Muhammad, had followed ‘Abd al-Mu’min's
march to Mashhad with particular apprehension because his appanage lay entirely in
northern Khurasan. Fearing that Marw, Nesa, Darun and Abiward might be next on
the Prince's list, he decided to help the small body of Khurasanis who, under the
leadership of Budagh Khan and other Iranian amirs, had agreed to try and relieve
Mashhad. But his intentions were misconstrued. When they heard that he was
approaching Khabushan with 6-7,000 men, the amirs at once changed direction and
marched against him. A battle took place, the Iranian side was defeated, and Nur
Muhammad made capital of his unwanted success by announcing it to ‘Abd alMu’min as a contribution to the Prince's campaign.75
72 QagiAhmad, 48-52. Iskandar Beg, 410-4. Muhammad Yusuf Munshi, 238b-40a. Mirza Beg,

73 Iskandar Beg, 414, Mirza Beg, 278b.
74 Muhammad Yisuf Munshi, 236b-40b.
75 Iskandar Beg, 414-6.

1583-98

He
years.
by his
during

now felt
However,
kinsman
the siege

safe, and indeed was safe from Bukharan attack for the next few
his new-found feelings of friendship for Bukhara were not shared
and sovereign, Hajjim Khan. Hajjim Khan had helped ‘Abdallah
of Herat. Later his son Muhammad Quli, who in 1588 had been

forced by Shah ‘Abbas to march with him to Khurasan, decided to launch an attack
against the Shah in retaliation and had succeeded in taking Astarabad. Since then,

however, the realisation that ‘Abdallah was as determined as he was capable had led
them to fear that his conquest of Khurasan would be followed by that of Khwarazm.
The safest course of action, therefore, seemed to be for Hajjim Khan to form an
alliance with Iran against ‘Abdallah. He did so, pledging himself to support the Shah,
and by September 1589 he had already sent troops against the Bukharan ruler.76
‘Abd al-Mu’min's letter to the Sultan had totally unforeseen results. It did not lead
to a strengthening of their mutual friendship and trust, nor to joint action against Iran
the following year. Instead Murad III took exception to the implication that the
khanate and the Ottoman Empire might be equal and that both would derive additional
power and fame from a joint campaign. Although ‘Abd al-Mu’min paid lip service to
the Sultan's superiority by saying that he would stand by the Sultan's stirrup and
eradicate Shi‘ism from the world at his bequest, Murad III felt very uneasy at the
thought that ‘Abdallah and his son might become his neighbours. Not only were they
aggressive and likely eventually to covet his possessions, but they were of undoubted
Sunni respectability, and if they took Azerbaijan, he would no longer be able to raid
the rich province on the pretext of fighting a holy war.
A letter from “Abdallah, which also reached the Sultan in 1590, confirmed his

suspicions about the two Janibegids. Whereas ‘Abd al-Mu’min's tone had at least
been friendly and respectful, ‘Abdallah's seems to have been condescending and even
insulting. According to the Muscovite ambassador to Istanbul, Nashchokin, ‘Abdallah
reproached the Sultan for failing to attack Astrakhan, where he claimed that the
Muslim religion was being insulted. He added that (in view of the Sultan's inaction)
he would attack the town himself. He requested 3,000 Janissaries and a contingent of
soldiers with firearms to assist him in this task. He also asked permission to go to
Mecca with no less than 10,000 men. Not surprisingly these demands were refused,
and ‘Abdallah was only granted permission to cross Turkey with a few men in order

to perform the pilgrimage.””
There is no evidence that ‘Abdallah availed himself of this permission, nor is it
clear why he chose to address the Sultan so aggressively. Could it be that after his
capture of Herat and Mashhad he thought himself capable of replacing the Sultan as
the champion of all Muslims? Was he anxious to prevent the Astrakhan authorities
from causing difficulties for Muslim travellers, or did he simply hope that an attack by
the Sultan would force the Tsar to transfer the troops that he had sent to Siberia to
Astrakhan, thus affording a respite to his distant relative and ally, Kuchum?
Whatever might have been the reason for “Abdallah's rather unpleasant missive, it
certainly spurred Murad III into action. He determined to thwart ‘Abd al-Mu’min's
and his father's plans for aggrandisement and pushed ahead with his peace
negotiations with Iran. This resulted in a peace treaty which was signed as early as
Nauruz 998/21 March 1590.78 The Sultan had chosen a good time for forcing ‘Abbas

76 Pamyatniki, XX, 111, 285.
77 Smirnov, Rossiya, 148.

78 Hammer, Histoire, VII, 223.

‘Abdallah and ‘Abd al-Mu’min

I to make peace. The young Shah's prestige was then very low, for he had neither
saved Mashhad, nor even tried to retake it after recovering from his illness.’? He
would have to work hard to establish control over Iran proper and to regain his
authority in Khurasan. He needed peace in the west in order to achieve this, and that
was why he was prepared to make costly concessions of territory to the Ottomans. He
did so with the firm intention of regaining all the lost provinces at the earliest
opportunity. He not only gave them Tabriz, Azerbaijan, Shirwan, Georgia and
Luristan, but even sent his nephew, Haidar Mirza, to Istanbul as a guarantee of his
good faith.80 Murad III also extracted from Shah ‘Abbas a promise that his subjects
would abandon the practice of cursing and reviling the first Caliphs and the wife of
the Prophet, Aisha. This was a major religious victory which enhanced his position as
the champion of orthodox Sunnism, and he had succeeded on both fronts without any
direct intervention from the khanate. The glory of success was therefore entirely his.
Meanwhile in 1590 the fighting had resumed in Khurasan. The Shah's latest
appointee to Mashhad, Sulaiman Khalifa, suffered a bitter disappointment when the
Shah, on recovering from his illness, gave up the idea of reconquering Mashhad and
returned to Qazwin. Feeling that he could not rely on his sovereign to take action,
Sulaiman Khalifa invited over Shah ‘Abbas's second cousin, Rustam Mirza, asking
him to drive out the Bukharan officials and troops, and take over the province.®!
Rustam Mirza, who had so far ruled the small province of Zamindawar, was only
too pleased to be offered Khurasan. Although he and his brother Muzaffar Husain
Mirza had been appointed to Zamindawar and Qandahar by Shah Muhammad
Khudabanda, they did not feel bound to give their allegiance to his son. Indeed they
had never been satisfied with their appointments. Rustam Mirza resented the fact that
he was meant to share Zamindawar with two of his younger brothers, and Muzaffar
Husain objected to the nomination by the Shah of a powerful viceregent to Qandahar,
Hamza Bik, who held the effective power in his hands. While the two brothers
struggled to strengthen their respective positions they became bitter enemies.
Although Muzaffar Husain helped Rustam Mirza at first with the attempted conquest
of neighbouring Sistan, when he married the daughter of Malik Mahmid, ruler of
Sistan, he prepared to defend his father-in-law against his brother by force of arms.
In his anger Rustam Mirza joined forces with Hamza Bik and attacked Qandahar. By
the time Sulaiman Khalifa's invitation arrived, however, Hamza Bik had been killed
and Rustam Mirza had been forced to abandon the siege of Qandahar.
On receiving Sulaiman Khalifa's invitation Rustam Mirza set off at once for
Khurasan, inflicting a serious defeat on the Bukharan forces at Fara, on his way.82

However, he did not follow up this initial success, and instead of continuing towards
Mashhad, he went to Quhistan where he strengthened the defences of Qa'in and Tun.
Then he set off to make yet another bid for Sistan. He formed an alliance with some
of Malik Mahmid's opponents, but made little progress, and when he heard that his
brother, Muzaffar Husain, had seized Zamindawar in retaliation, he hurried over to

try and recover the province.®3
79 Qadi Ahmad, 56.
80 Iskandar Beg, 529. Haidar Mirza was to remain in Turkey and he died there in 1596-7.

81 Mirza Beg, 278b.

82 Samsam al-Daula, III, 296-7, 434-5. From Abii ’1-Fadl's evidence it would seem that Fara was not

part of Sistan at that time. Aba ’l-Fadl, Akbarnama, III, 645.

83 Samsam al-Daula, III, 435, says that Rustam Mirza took Sistan and put Malik Mahmiad to death,
but this is not confirmed by the evidence available. Iskandar Beg, 482-3. Shah Husain, 271-3.

1583-98

Once again Sulaiman Khalifa had been disappointed in his expectations. When he
heard of Rustam Mirza's departure he decided to regain Khurasan by his own efforts.
If he then returned the province to Shah ‘Abbas, he would have a good chance of
securing a pardon and regaining the Shah's favour. Joining forces with the governors
of Tabas Masinan, Junabad and the province of Quhistan,84 he marched against
Turshiz and to his great delight they forced the Bukharan governor of this town to
flee. But their success was very short-lived. ‘Abdallah sent his nephew Din
Muhammad Sultan and Qul Baba Kikeltash against them in 999 (late 1590-91), and
in a lightning campaign they retook Turshiz, defeated the allies at Arghand, and even

killed Sulaiman Khalifa and his brother.85 The immediate threat to the Bukharan

conquest was over, but Mustafa Khan Kangarli of Tabas Masinan would continue to
fight the Bukharan army for another two years.
“Abdallah was then in the khanate. The happy news of his son's conquest of
Mashhad had reached him there in October 1589, at about the same time as the sadder
news of the death of his friend and adviser Khwajah Sa‘d. Shortly afterwards his
control over Badakhshan had been seriously threatened by a certain Muhammad
Zaman Mirza. This young man, an impostor who gave himself out to be the son of
the former ruler, Mirza Shahrukh, led the people against their Bukharan overlords.86
After an initial period of fighting in the area of Kulab, he sent to Akbar for help.
Akbar, who knew his claim to be false, refused to give him any military help, for he
did not want to jeopardise his treaty with ‘Abdallah. However, he invited the young
man over and sent him money and supplies. His friendly attitude doubtless
encouraged the impostor to make greater efforts against the governor of Badakhshan,
“Abd al-Mu’ min, whom he defeated and very nearly captured in spring 1590. ‘Abd
al-Mu’ min was furious at this blow to his honour and his reputation. In his anger he
wrote to Akbar, demanding, as some sort of proof of the Emperor's goodwill and
non-involvement in the rebellion, both the hand of his daughter in marriage, and the
return of those Badakhshani tribes who had left the khanate and settled in India. Such
demands were inadmissible. Akbar, who had apparently been warned about them,
arranged for the bearer of these demands to have a fatal accident on his way to Lahore

in June 1590, when he was crossing the Jhelum river.87
A few months later, in December 1590, another envoy from the khanate, Maulawi

Husaini, arrived at Akbar's Court with a message from ‘Abdallah. The message as
such has not survived, but Akbar's biographer says that ‘Abdallah apologised for his
son's impudence in demanding back the Badakhshani tribes, and ‘brought forward

his former proposals’.88 No doubt ‘Abdallah wished to remain on good terms with
Akbar, and to ensure that they were both united against Iran. Whether or not he
renewed his suggestion of joint action (his ‘former proposals’) he may have asked for
confirmation of the Emperor's agreement to his further plans against Khurasan.
Perhaps he even hoped for a formal ratification of the boundary treaty negotiated with
Hakim Humam. But Akbar does not appear to have answered his message and,
although he received Maulawi Husaini within a week, he kept him in India.
84 Junabad may be identical to Gunabad (modern Juymand), which Bartol'd places to the north-east of

Tun.
85 Mirza Beg, 278b-81b. Qadi Ahmad, 73-76. Iskandar Beg, 477, 488-9, appears to place both the
capture of Turshiz and the death of Sulaiman Khalifa in 1593-4. Arghand has not been identified.
86 Aba ’I-Fadl, Akbarndma, III, 575-8. Abi ’1-Qadir, II, 355, says he was no impostor.
87 Aba ’1-Fadl, ibid. For the Jhelum river see map entitled Routes to Iran, India and Kashghariya.

88 Aba ’1-Fadl, Akbarnama, III, 583-4.
67

‘Abdallah and ‘Abd al-Mu’min

He was probably reluctant to send the envoy back at a time when his power was
challenged in several parts of his realm. News of the rebellions of Bengal, Bihar and
Orissa were bound to make a bad impression on ‘Abdallah. Akbar waited for these
provinces to be pacified, but then in June 1592 a new rebellion broke out against him,
this time in Kashmir. He set off to crush the uprising and by the time he returned in
triumph, Maulawi Husaini had died, a victim to the food of Hindustan.®9
In the meantime an Iranian ambassador, Yadgar Sultan Shamlu, had arrived at
Akbar's Court in late May 1591 with a request from the Shah for either material, or
moral support in retaking Khurasan from ‘Abdallah. Akbar's advisers urged him to
send one of his sons to help Shah‘ Abbas, but the Emperor refused to break off
relations with ‘Abdallah. He decided to try and mediate between the parties in order to
prevent further hostilities. Conscious that the chief of the Tariki tribe, Jalala, had been
living in Ma wara’ al-nahr since 1588, he did not want to risk antagonising “Abdallah
who might then help Jalala and encourage him to resume his disruptive raids. Akbar's
refusal to take up arms against ‘Abdallah was to pay dividends, for Jalala eventually
left the khanate empty-handed in the spring of 1592..The Emperor, however, would
take no chances. Hearing that ‘Abdallah's nephew, Din Muhammad, had conquered

Tun and the large area of Quhistan centred round Tabas Masinan in 1591 and fearing
that he might follow this with a march against Qandahar, Akbar sent troops to the area

in January 1592, for he did not want ‘Abdallah as a neighbour.?
This was still in the distant future when ‘Abdallah sent embassies to Turkey and
Muscovy during Maulawi Husaini's stay in India. Little is known about the envoy to
Muscovy, except for his name, Khwajah Quli Bahadur, and the fact that he was an
official trader.9! As for the envoys to Istanbul, Hafiz Khutai and Sayyid Quli, they
were sent off in 1591 in answer to Salah Shah's embassy, with a letter in which

‘Abdallah assured Murad III of his friendly feelings and announced the latest
successes of his troops in Khurasan. As mentioned earlier, Salah Shah had taken
three years to reach Bukhara via India. In view of the Ottoman-Iranian peace treaty of
1590 his brief - to organise joint Ottoman-Bukharan action against Iran - was no
longer valid, and ‘Abdallah ignored it. However, he received him courteously and
sent him back via Urganj and Shirwan, loaded with presents. Here, to ‘Abdallah's
surprise and anger, the envoy was attacked and robbed of all but the barest minimum
by Hajjim Khan's son, Muhammad Ibrahim. This was an insult to his guest and to

himself which ‘Abdallah determined to avenge.?2
‘Abdallah also renewed relations with the Noghays. This was probably due to an
initiative taken by Urmamet (Urus Muhammad), who replaced Urus as their leader in
1591. The Noghays had become disillusioned with Tsar Fedor for repeatedly failing
to protect them from the Cossacks. They also viewed with suspicion the new towns
of Samara and Ufa, which the Tsar allegedly built to protect their settlements against

Kuchum.* ‘Abdallah's successes in Khurasan made such an impression upon them
89
99
91
92

Tbid., 710. CHI, IV, 139-40.
Aba ’I-Fadl, Akbarnaéma, III, 603.
Abii ’I-Fadl, Akbarnama, Ill, 587. Iskandar Beg, 429-30. Opisi, 186 ob.
Abii ’l-Qasim, Majma‘, 113a. The date for the despatch of these envoys is not known, although
it is known that the answer to their message was written by Farhad Pasha, who was Grand Vizier
between March 1592 and January 1593. Hammer, Geschichte, table of viziers. See Faridan Beg,
II, 239-41, for the letter sent back with these envoys. See Abi ’l-Ghazi (tr. 274-5, text 257) for
the attack on the Ottoman envoy.

93 Pekarskii, 5, 6, 8, 10, 11, 19, 20, 28.

1583-98

that by 1594 they were to turn to him for protection and help.
In Khurasan,

meanwhile,

the Bukharo-Iranian

conflict had continued

and

escalated. In 1591 Shah ‘Abbas had despatched his ablest amir, Farhad Khan, to
retake as much of the province as possible. Farhad Khan made a start at Nishapur,
helped by the governors of the Khurasani towns still controlled by Iran, and also by
Hajjim Khan of Khwarazm, who had volunteered his services. The siege was well
under way when it was heard that ‘Abd al-Mu’min, who had presumably restored
order in Badakhshan, was on his way towards Khurasan. Hajjim Khan at once left
for Khwarazm and Farhad Khan, who had been expressly forbidden to take the field
against “Abdallah or his son, had no option but to raise the siege and leave.?2
When ‘Abd al-Mu’ min arrived outside Nishapur, the coast was clear. He was able
therefore to settle scores with the Bayat tribe, who had earlier killed large numbers of
Bukharans. Then he made for Isfara’in which he besieged, this town still being under
Iranian control, contrary to his letter to Murad III. The siege lasted four months and
was very costly to both sides. When the town fell ‘Abd al-Mu’min had the garrison
massacred, then his army captured Sabzawar and the other towns situated between
Isfara’in and Nishapur, after which, well satisfied with his achievement, ‘Abd al-

Mu’ min returned to the khanate.%
It is at this stage that his cousin, Din Muhammad, who stayed behind in
Khurasan, made a bid for Quhistan, starting with the towns of Tun and Janabad.%4
By the end of 1591 Quhistan and the greater part of Khurasan were in Bukharan
hands. Shah ‘Abbas, who had spent most of his youth in Khurasan, was determined
to reconquer this province. But he could do nothing that winter, so he planned on
leading his army there in the spring of 1592. However, before he could do so, it was
imperative for him to deal with a potential trouble spot in his rear - the small, semiindependent state of Gilan near the Caspian.
Khan Ahmad of Gilan, who had already caused trouble during the reign of Shah
Tahmasp, had little love for Iran where he had spent ten years in prison from 1567.
After the Irano-Ottoman peace of 1590 he openly defied Shah ‘Abbas by giving
asylum to his opponents, and refusing all extradition requests. When, in 1591, the
Shah forced him to extradite the Iranian rebels, Khan Ahmad turned to the Sultan,

offering him Gilan, together with neighbouring Lahijan. Shah ‘Abbas could not allow
the Sultan to take up this offer, as an Ottoman presence in the area would be a direct
threat to Qazwin. Consequently, in the spring of 1592 he sent Farhad Khan to
conquer Gilan while he himself went to Azerbaijan, in order to protect the area from
any possible Ottoman intervention. After Farhad Khan had forced Khan Ahmad to
flee to Turkey, Shah ‘Abbas marched to Gilan. He annexed the province, and after
making several administrative appointments there and in Lahijan, he set off in the
direction of Bistam and Khurasan.
In the meantime ‘Abdallah and his son had gone to Khwarazm in 1592 at the
request of Nar Muhammad Khan of Marw. This Prince had recently lost the greater
part of his possessions to his suzerain, the overall ruler of Khwarazm, Hajjim Khan,
who viewed him with the geatest hostility. The reason for Hajjim Khan's hostility
towards Nur Muhammad Khan, an adopted son of Abi ’1-Muhammad, was that he
suspected him of being the son of a prostitute. This was not proven, although his

92 Iskandar Beg, 444-5.
93 Thid., 445-6. Sharaf al-Din, II, 294, places these conquests in 999/1590-1 and attributes them all

to ‘Abdallah.
94 Mirzd Beg, 281b-2b.

‘Abdallah and ‘Abd al-Mu’min
mother, a drum-player, was of humble origin. She had come to entertain Abu ’1Muhammad after he lost his only son, Jalal Sultan, and he had become so attached to
her that he made her son his heir. When he died Nur Muhammad had accordingly
inherited Marw, Darun, Abivard, Baghabad and Nesa, but his fellow Khwaramian

Princes refused to recognise him, saying he was the son of a Juli, and conducting
yearly attacks on his possessions. In 1591 these attacks had escalated and the siege of
Marw was undertaken by Hajjim Khan. Although the siege had to be discontinued
when Hajjim Khan went to join Farhad Khan at Nishapur, it was resumed in 1592
and this time Hajjim Khan had been completely successful, capturing not only Marw,
but also Nesa, Darun and Baghabad. Nar Muhammad had then appealed for help to
‘Abdallah, mentioning no doubt their connection through his adoptive father and his
own capture of Khabishan in 1587. He had also offered to give ‘Abdallah the towns
of Marw and Chahar Jay and to recognise him as his sovereign, and “Abdallah
responded eagerly to his appeal, for he had several scores to settle with Hajjim Khan.
He probably knew of Hajjim's help to Farhad Khan outside Nishapur the previous
year. He wanted to avenge the Ottoman envoy Salah Shah, who had been robbed by
Hajjim's son in 1590. He was also determined to punish the Khwarazmian ruler
because his nephew, Baba Sultan, had attackeda caravan of Bukharan pilgrims in
1591.95
‘Abdallah marched to Marw, which he promptly took from Hajjim's nominee,
then he annexed the town and appointed a Bukharan governor. Nur Muhammad was
bitterly disappointed not to be reinstated as expected and when he suddenly realised
that ‘Abd al-Mu’min wanted to take him into custody, he fled to Urganj, thinking it
safer after all to patch up relations with Hajjim Khan.9° At this stage ‘Abdallah
surprised the Khwarazmian Princes by abruptly discontinuing the campaign and
retuming to the khanate. This was because his control over Khurasan was being
threatened. ‘Abdallah knew that a large Persian army was gathering at Bistam, on the
frontiers of Khurasan, and that Shah ‘Abbas intended to reconquer the province. He
may have already received from him a letter which, not surprisingly, was totally free

from courteous preambles.97 The young Shah explained that, although he would
prefer to avoid a military confrontation, for it would cause further hardship and
destruction in the province, he was ready for war and not afraid of ‘a few criminal
Uzbegs’. They, and they alone would be to blame for the conflict and the ensuing

devastation.?8 In the circumstances ‘Abdallah thought it best to send his son to
Khurasan and to retire to the khanate, where he was near enough to the theatre of
action to intervene, if necessary.
When ‘Abd al-Mu’ min arrived in Khurasan he answered the Shah with a suitably
aggressive letter. If the Shah wanted peace he should relinquish Khurasan. As in the
days of (the Timurid) Husain Baiqara (1469-1506) and Hasan Padshah Turkman,

Balkh and Khurasan would then have one ruler, and Iran and Azerbaijan another. If
the Shah wanted war, however, ‘Abd al-Mu’min was ready for it, and the outcome
95 Aba ”|-Ghazi, tr. 275-6, text 257-8. The location of Baghabad has not been found.

96 Iskandar Beg, 452. Aba ’I-Ghazi, tr. 276, text 258-9. Mirza Beg, 285b, appears to place the
capture of Marw two years earlier, in 998/1589-90.
97 This letter is undated like most of the epistles reproduced by Aba ’1-Qasim. Approximate dates

have been established, whenever possible, by a close study of the contents and the known
historical context. See further about this and other letters exchanged by Shah ‘Abbas and ‘Abd alMu’ min in Burton ,"The War of Words".
98 Aba ’1-Qasim, Nushkhat, 232a-b.

1583-98

would be determined by God, not by the larger size of any one army.%
In a second, and much more courteous letter, sent shortly afterwards, ‘Abd alMu’min took a completely different line. Making no mention of Khurasan, he putina
plea for their mutual friendship and also tried to sever the Irano-Khwarazmian
alliance. Was the Prince merely demonstrating his expertise in the ‘carrot and stick’
school of diplomacy, or had he realised that the Shah was in a position of strength
and that a more conciliatory attitude was therefore essential? In any case he did his
best to place the onus of war on the Shah. ‘Abd al-Mu’min warned ‘Abbas not to
place undue reliance on the Khwarazmian Princes. He explained that they had proved
unreliable allies to himself and his father, and that they had now formed an alliance
with the Geraili tribe of Astarabad, who were no better than highwaymen, for they
held up traders and pilgrims from the khanate. No good could accrue to the Shah
from an alliance with them. Deploring the lack of safety on the routes between their
countries, he then advised Shah ‘Abbas, who was two years his junior, to strengthen
the foundations of his friendship with the khanate and to ensure that its traders,
travellers and students might travel freely to Iran, and also to Mecca, as they had done
in the late fifteenth century. Finally the Prince announced that Pir Muhammad
Qunghrat would be taking a copy of the Qur‘an to the Shah on his behalf, in token of

friendship. !00
“Abd al-Mu’min then strengthened Mashhad with a view to withstanding a siege

and went south to Jam where he awaited an answer to his letters.!0! Shah ‘Abbas,
who had received both letters in Bistam, did not hurry to answer. He continued his
march towards Khurasan and on hearing of his approach the inhabitants of Mazinan
killed their Bukharan governor. This in turn frightened the governors of Jajarm,
Isfara’in, Nishapur, Sabzawar and other towns, into deserting their posts. Such
unexpected and bloodless success delighted the Shah and made him confident that
total victory was at hand. In his answer to ‘Abd al-Mu’ min, written in Jajarm on 29
Dhi ’1-qa‘da/6 September, he rejected as irrelevant the suggestion that they should
agree a settlement based on the one concluded by Husain Baiqara and Uzin Hasan.
They should base themselves instead on the agreement which he claimed had been
reached between ‘Abd al-Mu’min's great-uncles, Kisten Qara and Pir Muhammad,
rulers of Balkh, and ‘Abbas's grandfather, Shah Tahmasp, under which Khurasan
had been ceded to Iran. If the Prince would not agree to this, he must choose a
battleground and there the matter would be decided.!
From Jajarm Shah ‘Abbas went on to Isfara’in where, for some unkown reason,

he thought that he might meet the Prince. As soon as he arrived he sent back Pir
Muhammad Qunghrat and renewed his offer of peace or war. He stayed in the town
for a month, and during this time he answered ‘Abd al-Mu’min's warnings about the

Khwarazmian Princes and the Geraili in a letter which he entrusted to Imam Quli
Bahadur. Putting forward his own edited version of Khwarazmo-Safawid relations,

he described
grandfather,
Princes who
warned ‘Abd

them as uniformly friendly. He even listed Nur Muhammad Khan's
Din Muhammad, who had been a major enemy of Iran, as one of the
had waited on his ancestors at Court! 193 With regard to the Geraili, he
al-Mu’min that they were related to the Safawids and would fight back,

99 Tbid., 237a. Iskandar Beg, 452.
100 Aba ’1-Qasim, Nuskha, 235b-6a.

101 Thid., 240b, 235a.
102 Tid, 237a-b. Iskandar Beg, 453. No written evidence of such an agreement has so far been found.

103 Aba ’1-Ghazi, tr: 211-2, 229-30, 254.

‘Abdallah and ‘Abd al-Mu’min

if attacked. He suggested therefore that a peaceful solution be found to the problems
encountered by Bukharan traders and pilgrims near Astarabad. His letter ended with a
request that Khurasan be evacuated by the Bukharans, and a note of regret that ‘Abd
al-Mu’ min had left the province ‘in haste’ to go to his father, cheating the Shah of the
possibility of meeting him on the battlefield.!™
This, of course, was pure fabrication.

‘Abd al-Mu’min,

who

was

at Jam,

hastened to answer with a remarkably friendly but ambiguous letter in which he
appeared to be reconciled to the idea that he had lost Khurasan altogether. In this
letter, which Mirza Khwajah delivered to the Shah on 14 Dho ’I-hijja 1000/21
September 1592, ‘Abd al-Mu’min explained that only a nominal force was kept in
Mashhad for strategic reasons. He also mentioned that he was having difficulties with
his family, referring perhaps to some disagreement with his cousin Din Muhammad,
who was then monitoring events in southern Khurasan, and who may have been
reluctant to come to his help. And the letter closed with an expression of hope that he

might soon meet the Shah.10
But this was not to be. The weather had become very cold, and the Shah had
decided to return to Iran. He did not wish to besiege Mashhad, a decision which

Iskandar Beg tries hard to explain away, saying that large numbers of Bukharan
troops were known to be concentrating there in preparation for a siege, that the season
was far too advanced, that supplies were scarce and that the Shah was reluctant to
cause damage to the holy city, while exposing its inhabitants to further hardship.1°
In fact the Shah not only lacked the confidence and ability to undertake a lengthy
siege, but it would appear that, despite his bombastic letters, he was also reluctant to
fight a decisive battle with the Bukharan Prince.
He therefore made no effort to march south and meet the Prince at Jam. Instead he
appointed governors to the towns which had been recovered, and in order to avoid
any accusation of cowardice he wrote a carefully worded letter to ‘Abd al-Mu’min in
which he blamed the Prince for his own pitiful inaction. He alleged that he had not
marched to Jam because the Prince had left on hearing of his approach. He demanded
the return of the whole of Khurasan and promised that, after recovering the province,

he would give ‘Abd al-Mu’min his friendship and support. With regard to Mashhad
he claimed to have dropped the idea of a siege only because he trusted ‘Abd alMu’min's assurance (that the town was held by a few men and merely for strategic
reasons). He ended with a promise that the ‘letter of peace’ sent with Mirza Khwajah
would be answered after his own ambassador, Imam Quli Bahadur, was returned.
107
Two more letters were exchanged before the Shah left the province in the autumn
of 1592.108 In a rather patronising missive ‘Abd al-Mu’min gave the impression that
he was ready to relinquish Khurasan, but he also did his best to encourage the Shah
to leave the province. He urged Shah ‘Abbas not to worry about the presence of
Qazaq troops in Herat, for they had no intention of settling there. Their Prince, he
said, was the ruler of Tashkent, a statement which was as incorrect as it was

irrelevant and which might have been aimed at putting the Shah's mind at rest. He
went on to announce that he was taking his troops to Herat via Jam, which appeared
104
105
106
107
108

Aba ’1-Qasim, Nuskha, 236a-7a.
Thid., 235a-b. See Mirza Beg, 284a, about Din Muhammad's movements.
Iskandar Beg, 454.
Aba ’1-Qasim, Nushkhat, 237b-8b
Iskandar Beg, 454, places his departure in late autumn. Qadi Ahmad, 97, says he left Khurasan in
October and arrived at Qum on 25 Rabi‘I 1001/31 December.

1583-98
to indicate that he was beginning his retreat towards the khanate, and he assured

“Abbas that there was no need for him to go to Mashhad or Turbat, since Khurasan
would be his, provided that his soldiers did nothing to ruffle the Qazaqs. Finally ‘Abd
al-Mu’min gave ‘Abbas a piece of strategic advice: he would do better to keep his
troops together rather than allow them to go in small groups in the direction of Qa'in
and Tun. If this advice referred to the campaign then being conducted by the Afshar
amirs and Mustafa Khan Kangarli against Tun, it was less than disinterested for the
campaign was conducted so vigorously that it was bound to be, and indeed proved to
be, successful, Tun being eventually recaptured for the Shah and several Bukharan
heads being sent to the Shah as trophies.
This letter from “Abd al-Mu’min was welcomed by ‘Abbas, for it made it easier
for him to leave the province. In his answer he referred with pleasure to the Prince's
announcement that his troops were heading south-east to Herat. He repeated that he
had given up the idea of retaking Mashhad (and Herat) only because of the Prince's
expressions of friendship and because of his assurances that a nominal force was kept
in Mashhad for reasons of expediency. But he ignored the information given about

the Qazaqs and the advice proffered regarding Tun and Qa'in.!®
Thus ended the war of words in 1592, and Shah ‘Abbas and ‘Abd al-Mu’min
returned to their respective countries. ‘Abbas was well satisfied with the territory
recovered. Giving free reign to wishful thinking, he let it be known far and wide that
he had recovered Iri and Meshet (Herat and Mashhad), and that he had also inflicted
heavy casualties on the Bukharan army, hoping that his imaginative tale of glory
would not only impress others but also help to demoralise his Bukharan foe.!1°
“Abdallah was not unduly concerned by the turn of events in Khurasan. Only the
lesser towns had been lost, and not as a result of military action. The main towns
were Still in his hands, and he felt confident that he would regain the others with little
difficulty. He therefore returned to Khwarazm intending to re-occupy Marw and to
complete the conquest which he had begun so successfully the previous year, and if
we are to believe the Khwarazmian historian, Abu ’1-Ghazi, he arrived there in early

February (hut) 1593.11! A successful campaign was bound to benefit his Treasury
while increasing his power and prestige. It might also help to restore some warmth in
his relations with Turkey, for Murad III would no doubt approve of a punitive
expedition against the Princes who had robbed his envoy Salah Shah three years
earlier.
The letter which ‘Abdallah had received from Istanbul in 1592 had done little to
reassure him about Murad III's attitude. There were no congratulations on his armies'
successes in Khurasan, only a dry acknowledgement of his capture of Herat and his
plans (or rather ‘Abd al-Mumin’s plans) for conquering Bistam and Damghan and
marching on Qazwin. Although somewhat reassured by the Sultan's explanation that
the peace with Iran was only a generous response to ‘Abbas's submission and to his

109 Mirza Beg, 283a-b. Iskandar Beg, 455-6. Abu 1-Qasim, Nuskha, 238b-9b.

110 pamyatniki, XX, 162, 174. This news was taken to Muscovy in June 1592 by the Iranian
courier, Kai, and taken there again in January 1593 by the so-called Gilanian ambassador
Neamet.
111 Abs ’1-Ghazi, tr. 277, text 260. The campaign may have started later, however, for it seems

unlikely that ‘Abd al-Mu’min, who set off at the same time as his father, should have taken as

long as three months to reach Nishapur where he arrived (just) before the crops were harvested,
ive. late April-early May, if he had indeed seized the whole of Nur Muhammad Khan's appanage
in what was described as a lightning campaign. Iskandar Beg, 464.

‘Abdallah and ‘Abd al-Mu’min

request for assistance, and that the terms of this peace would have to be scrupulously
adhered to, ‘Abdallah must have resented the Sultan's strongly expressed disapproval
of further Bukharan expansion in Khurasan. He cannot have liked the implied threat
in the Sultan's suggestion that he ought to be satisfied with his gains so far. This,
surely, was an intolerable attempt to curtail his freedom of action and, although
Murad III added that ‘Abdallah was entitled to retaliate (in Khurasan) if attacked, and
that the Ottomans would certainly help him in such a case, it was clear that their earlier

!12
friendship had not survived the news of ‘Abdallah's victories.
All traces of Ottoman goodwill for the khanate had in fact disappeared a few
months after the despatch of Murad III's letter, and for the most unlikely reason.
When Gilan was taken by Shah ‘Abbas's generals, Khan Ahmad fled to Istanbul,
from whence he hoped to return with Ottoman backing. He thought that Gilan, with
its Caspian coastline, would be a welcome addition to Ottoman territory, as it would
round off their recent conquest of Azerbaijan, but the Sultan was unwilling to take up
arms against Iran and to give up a very advantageous peace treaty for his sake. In any
case Khan Ahmad was unlikely to prove a docile vassal, and he would require
constant support by force of arms in the future. The situation was complicated further
by rumours that ‘Abdallah was intending to seize*Gilan. This was looked upon with
apprehension in Istanbul, for it was thought that ‘Abdallah might follow such a
conquest with an attack on Iran proper, after which he would become Turkey's
dangerous and unwelcome neighbour. Although the rumours appear to have had no
foundation, Murad III acted upon them and decided that in the circumstances the
conquest of Gilan by Iran was the lesser evil. He therefore gave up his role as
protector of Khan Ahmad in May, and when he dismissed the Iranian ambassador
from Istanbul in August 1592, he went so far as to promise that he would support the
Shah against the ‘Osbeck Tatares’.!13
“Abdallah's conquest of Khwarazm was both rapid and effortless. In early 1593
Hajjim Khan had left Urganj to one of his sons and made for Darun. The elderly
Khwarazmian ruler, now aged 68, was not keen to cross swords with ‘Abdallah. He
apparently feared that the local Uzbegs would not support him and perhaps he thought
that he had a better chance of defending the Khwarazmian possessions in northern
Khurasan. But this was not to be, for ‘Abdallah mounted a two-pronged attack on
Khwarazm, sending his son to Marw while he himself marched towards Khiva.
Hajjim Khan's relatives, who were left to defend the greater part of Khwarazm
without him, first decided to withdraw to Khiva and to defend this town, as Timur

Sultan had done with surprising success in 1576. They accordingly evacuated
Hazarasp and went to Khiva, but did not stay long. Unsure of their own followers,
they soon decided to retire instead to the northern town of Wazir, held by the sons of
Mahmid Sultan.
Their retreat, however, was undertaken at a very leisurely pace. Indeed, even after
they were told that “Abdallah's amir, the Qalmaq Khwajam Quli, had reached Khiva
with the first detachments of the Bukharan army straight after their departure, they
would not hurry. Encumbered by their families and retainers, and their chariots
loaded with household goods and even live chickens, they continued at such a
leisurely pace, ambling along “as if (on their way) to a feast’, to quote Hajjim Khan's
grandson Abu ’1-Ghazi, that the Bukharan army easily overtook them. A battle took
112 Faridin Beg, II, 240-1.
113 Hammer, Histoire, VU, 250.

1583-98

place and, as they showed more concern for their possessions than for making a
stand, they were of course defeated. Surprisingly enough, however, none of them
were killed and they even managed to get to Wazir, as originally planned.
The appanage rulers of Wazir, Mahmid Sultan's sons, welcomed all but one to
the town. They refused to let in the Prince called Baba Sultan whose attack on
Bukharan pilgrims had brought down ‘Abdallah's wrath on all of them. He was
accordingly forced to leave for Darun with his brothers and his father, Pulad, but
despite his departure the remaining Princes soon found themselves under siege, and
“Abdallah himself conducted the siege.!14 This time he was determined to crush the
Khwarazmian Princes into submission. According to Mahmid b. Wali, he even tried
to divert the Amu-Darya back to its old course in the hope of overcoming the
unseasonable heat and the dangerous water shortage.!15
A month later, however, he had achieved little and water was running out, so he
tried another approach and began to negotiate. He assured the Princes that they had
nothing to fear, as he was, after all, related to them, and Baba Sultan was no longer in
their midst. The Princes were only too pleased to believe him. Feeling confident that
Hajjim Khan's presence in Darun would act as some sort of deterrent, they asked for
confirmation that ‘Abdallah meant them no harm. ‘Abdallah at once sent over five
major officials, including the governor of Samarqand, to swear to this. The Princes
were delighted. They angrily rejected a suggestion by the people of Wazir that the
officials be kept as hostages until ‘Abdallah left the area and returned to Bukhara.
Forgetting that he would doubtless want to punish Muhammad Ibrahim for attacking
the Ottoman ambassador, Salah Shah, they even persuaded themselves that the
Bukharan ruler would give them either Urganj and Wazir, or else some other more
valuable towns to govern. They accordingly left Wazir, went to his camp and were at
once put under guard. “Abdallah then had a census taken to establish the amount of
tax which could be extracted from Khwarazm, and after appointing governors to the
various towns, he left for Bukhara, taking the Princes with him. Whether or not, as
claimed by Abu ’1-Ghazi, ‘Abdallah had them put to death on reaching the khanate,

which is mentioned neither by Sharaf al-Din nor even by the Shah's Court historian,
Iskandar Beg, who was both well-informed and hostile to the khanate, the Princes

were not heard of again.!16
Meanwhile, further south, ‘Abd al-Mu’min completed the conquest of
Khwarazm, taking Abiward, Nesa, Baghabad and Darun without difficulty. Hajjim
Khan made no attempt to intervene. Leaving Darun with his remaining sons and
nephews, he fled to Iran where he found, to his disappointment, that his béte noire
had preceded him. Worse still, Nir Muhammad Khan was on the best of terms with

the Shah, whom he had even accompanied on a campaign to Luristan./17 Shah
‘Abbas, however, warmly welcomed the new arrival and promised to reinstate him,
as indeed he would reinstate Nur Muhammad. He showed both Princes the greatest
friendship and invited them regularly to Court, but he had a better rapport with Nur

114 Aba ’1-Ghazi, tr. 278-80, text 259-62.
115 Barto'ld, “K istorii orosheniya”, 93-94. Bartol'd, “K istorii Khorezma”.

116 Aba ’1-Ghazi, tr. 280-2, text 262-3.
117 Iskandar Beg, 464, 468, 473. Luristan is due south of Qazwin. Abi ’1-Ghazi (tr. 282, text 264)

says that Nar Muhammad was in Darun and left this town for Iran with Hajjim Khan and his
relatives, but his account, written half a century after the event, is unlikely to be as reliable as
that of one who was alive at the time. Sharaf al-Din, II, 297, says erroneously that Norim (Nur
Muhammad) was Hajjim Khan's son.

‘Abdallah and ‘Abd al-Mu’min

Muhammad Khan, who was not so strict in matters of religion and who disapproved
neither of his host's pastimes nor of his love of wine.
After taking the Khwarazmian possessions of northern Khurasan, ‘Abd alMu’min tried to regain the Khurasani towns lost to the Shah in 1592. He began by
laying siege to Nishapur. The Iranian governor resisted valiantly for several months,
even after he was told that he would get no help from the Shah, who was still fighting
in Luristan, or from Farhad Khan, who was similarly engaged in Gilan. At last he ran
out of food, so he began to negotiate and after ‘Abd al-Mu’min promised him safeconduct, he surrendered. The Prince kept his promise. Praising him highly for his
courage, he allowed him to leave with his men, surely the act of a true statesman. But
Iskandar Beg refuses to accept this as praiseworthy magnanimity, alleging that “Abd
al-Mu’min kept his word only because he feared that his men would sustain serious
losses if they prevented the governor's departure.
‘Abd al-Mu’min then retired to Mashhad for the winter, leaving his amirs with
instructions to retake Sabzawar. They made little progress, however, and soon
decided to accept the strange compromise suggested by the governor. An honorary
Bukharan governor and his retinue of 50 would take up residence in Sabzawar for a
period of six months, and if the Shah's army did.not appear before the expiry of this
trial period, the town would be handed over formally.
The arrangement did not work. The local people missed no opportunity to insult
the Sunnis in general and their Bukharan guests in particular, and several fights broke
out. The Bukharans were eventually overpowered and sent as prisoners to Qazwin.
Although Shah ‘Abbas disapproved of the Sabzawari breach of faith and
demonstrated this by sending the prisoners back to Mashhad in early 1594, loaded
with presents, “Abd al-Mu’min determined to take his revenge on Sabzawar, the

Iranian people and their ruler.!18
Meanwhile in southern Khurasan Mustafa Khan Kangarlu, who had retired to
Tabas Kildi, had continued to fight the Bukharan amirs. In 1592 after retaking the
towns of Tun and Janabad, lost after the defeat and death of Sulaiman Khalifa, he

sent the heads of those who had been killed to Shah ‘Abbas. The Shah was delighted.
He sent 100 of these heads to the governor of Gordebil as a gift which the so-called
ambassador of Gilan made a point of mentioning to the Muscovite authorities in
January 1593.119 Mustafa Khan Kangarli's success, however, was short-lived. In
the Year of the Snake (starting late March 1593) Din Muhammad Sultan fought him
with the help of the various Bukharan governors of Khurasan. He retook Tun, had
Mustafa Khan killed, !20 and went on to Sistan where, according to Mirza Beg, he
and his brother Bagi Muhammad clashed with Rustam Mirza of Zamindawar.
Rustam Mirza, who had retaken Zamindawar from Muzaffar Husain circa 1590,
had since lost it again to his brother and had gone back to Sistan. He was hoping to
establish a viable principality there for himself, but he had so far been repeatedly
defeated by the Bukharan forces. Faced with their enmity and that of the Sistanis, he
at last decided to leave the area and retired to what the various sources called Qala, a

general term meaning fort, which they seem to place either near Herat, or in the
mountainous area east of Herat called Hazarjat, although it seems more likely that this

118 Iskandar Beg, 464-8.
119 Pamyatniki, XX, 174.

120 Iskandar Beg, 455-6. Mirza Beg, 282b-4b.

1583-98

was one of the forts situated in the vicinity of Qandahar.!2! He remained there
unmolested for some time, but after his mother was put to death by a detachment sent
over from Qandahar by his brother, Muzaffar Husain, Rustam Mirza took fright and
fled to India, where he arrived in October 1593, to a warm welcome from Akbar.!22
Din Muhammad, who had succeeded in making the Sistanis pay yearly taxes to
‘Abdallah, although they would not recognise ‘Abdallah as their sovereign, marched
into Zamindawar shortly after Rustam Mirza's flight to India. He conquered this
province, together with Garmsir, then he marched on Qandahar, where he besieged

Muzaffar Husain in early 1594. This was a cause of some concern to ‘Abdallah,
because he did not want to risk a break with Akbar. He also feared that overt
antagonism might drive the mirza into Akbar's arms and give the Emperor a perfect
excuse for seizing Qandahar. He therefore instructed Din Muhammad to abandon the
siege, explaining that he and Akbar had established the Hindu Kush and Qandahar ‘as
a boundary between (their) two states’.123 ‘Abdallah then despatched several
missions to Muzaffar Husain Mirza to try and persuade this Prince that he wished him
no ill, and that there was no need for him to turn to India for help. However, perhaps
because Din Muhammad and his army remained threateningly near Qandahar for some
time, this diplomatic initiative was dismal failure. Muzaffar Husain not only turned to
India, he sent his mother and son to Akbar's Court, where they arrived in March
1594, bringing his apologies to the Emperor (for not having acknowledged his
sovereignty sooner). But the Emperor did not want him for a mere vassal. He invited
the Prince to Court and when Muzaffar Husain failed to understand that this was an
order, a Mughal army was despatched to Qandahar. The town was taken in Farwardin
1003/April 1595 and by August Muzaffar Husain had reluctantly made his way to
India. Upset and bewildered by the sudden change in his fortunes, he could not
reconcile himself to his loss of independence, and seems to have died shortly

124
afterwards.
Meanwhile, in 1593 Shah ‘Abbas had attempted to compensate for his inaction in
Khurasan by proclaiming his determination to win the next round against ‘Abdallah.
He promised to reinstate the Khwarazmian Princes. He also tried to obtain help and
support from Akbar by sending him the heads of some of the Bukharans killed in
Khurasan. This appears to have elicited no response from the Emperor. Concerned
about Akbar's lack of response and about the wellbeing of his last ambassador,
Yadgar Sultan Shamli, who had been in India since May 1591, Shah ‘Abbas
despatched another ambassador who reached Akbar's Court in April 1594.125
By 1594 the first signs of estrangement between ‘Abdallah and his son had begun
to appear. ‘Abd al-Mu’min was dissatisfied with the result of his campaigns and
jealous of Qul Baba Kikeltash's influence over his father. He demanded the amir's

121 Aba ’1-Fadl, Akbarnama, III, 645. Iskandar Beg, 485. It could have been Qala Bist, south-west
of Qandahar, or Qala-yi Ghilzai, north-west of the town, now known as Qalat.

122 Iskandar Beg, 484-5. Samsam, III, 435-6. Aba ’I-Fadl, Akbarnama, III, 645-6.
123 Sharaf al-Din, II, 294, says that Sistan was conquered by Bukhara in 999/1590. If that was the
case, then the campaign of 1593 was a campaign to reconquer the area. Iskandar Beg, 486-7.
Hajji Mir, 138b, gives no date for this letter and appears to believe that Rustam Mirza and his
brother resisted Din Muhammad together in Qandahar, which is not only incorrect but also
unlikely, in view of the brothers' well-known hostility for each other.

124 Aba ’1-Fadl, Akbarnama, Ill, 650, 668, 671. Iskandar Beg, 486. Muhammad Jahangir Khan's
suggestion (129-30) that ‘Abdallah's assurances to Muzaffar Husain came after the mirza had
written to Akbar for help does not seem to be confirmed by contemporary evidence.

125 Riazul Islam, A calendar, I, 122. Abi ’1-Fadl, Akbarndma, III, 587, 650.
TT

‘Abdallah and ‘Abd al-Mu’min

post, and also asked ‘Abdallah, who had reached the age of sixty, to step down and
to leave him in charge of the khanate. When his requests were refused, he threatened
to take Herat from Qul Baba by force. But ‘Abdallah retaliated by instructing the
Bukharan amirs and Princes serving in Khurasan to disregard his son's orders in the
future, and this forced ‘Abd al-Mu’min to climb down. Instead of marching on Herat
he decided that he would increase his prestige by fighting nearer home. Making for
Badakhshan, he defeated the pretender, and when Muhammad Zaman Mirza fled the
province, without a thought for possible consequences, he pursued him as far as

Kabul.126
Fearing that his son's rashness, and also Din Muhammad's threatening presence
near Qandahar might be taken amiss by Akbar, and concerned by the lack of news of
either Ahmad ‘Ali or Maulawi Husaini, ‘Abdallah hastened to send an envoy to India.
Mulla Salih Bukhari, who arrived there shortly after his Iranian opposite number,
made a good impression at Akbar's Court, for he was knowledgeable in science and
tolerant in matters of faith. And perhaps it is because of him that Akbar continued to
correspond with ‘Abdallah during the following months. Several letters are known to
have been written for him by Hakim Humam until his death in November 1595, and
later by Abi ’1-Fad1, but no major Mughal embassy was despatched to the khanate for

another two years.127
Further diplomatic moves by ‘Abdallah in that year included strengthening his
links with the Noghays and despatching an ambassador to Istanbul. The Noghays
were promised a stronghold at Saraichik on the Ural river where they would be safe
from Cossack attacks, and this was viewed with much suspicion by the Qazags. In
February 1595 Tawakkul's envoy went so far as to warn the Muscovite authorities
that ‘Abdallah intended to use this stronghold as a base from which to attack
Astrakhan.!28The Noghays themselves also appear to have become suspicious about
‘Abdallah's motives, which is probably why, shortly afterwards, they turned instead
to Tsar Fedor. Complaining that they were hard-pressed by “Abdallah, they requested
the Tsar to build them a fort on the Ural river, in order ‘to protect them’ against
“Abdallah. But within a few months ‘Abdallah managed to regain their confidence,
and they asked for the Muscovite fort to be pulled down, on the pretext that it had

been erected over a Tatar cemetery!
129
The ambassador whom ‘Abdallah despatched to Istanbul, Ushah Bahadur, left the
khanate straight after the conquest of Khwarazm, but he only arrived in January
1594. He brought the Sultan gifts from the khanate - the famous curly Qarakil pelts
and several examples of the art of Bukharan calligraphers - and also sables and ermine
which were no doubt intended to show that ‘Abdallah had healthy trade links with
Muscovy and Siberia. In his letter ‘Abdallah gave a detailed account of his conquest
of Khwarazm, including the capture of 21 Khwarazmian Princes and the freeing of all
the travellers and traders held in the country. He also declared his intention of
continuing the fight against the ‘Qizilbash’ and all those who ‘blocked the highways’

and interfered with traders and pilgrims.13°
126 Iskandar Beg, 550. Abi *I-Fadl, Akbarnama, III, 652. Aba ’1-Qasim, Nuskha, 240b.
127 Aba ’1-Fadl, Akbarnama, Ill, 650, 696. Eodem, Mukdtabat, 213-4.
128 Kazakhsko-russkie

otnosheniya, 3.

129 Pamyatniki, XX, 366.

130 Hammer, Geschichte, Il, 590, says the lambskins were from Khurasan, but this is unlikely, as
the best ones were from Qarakil in the khanate. Abi *l-Qasim, Majma‘, 112b-3a.

1583-98

‘Abdallah's gifts and news must have made the right impression on Murad III, for
shortly afterwards he sent an answer and a rich robe with Ushah Bahadur. The Sultan
took pains to convince ‘Abdallah that, although he had agreed to peace with Iran, he
was still determined to fight for the Muslim faith. He also tried to impress him with
his achievements. He gave details of the many provinces - Shirwan, Gurjistan
(Georgia), Armenia, Azarbaijan - which he had conquered from Shah ‘Abbas and
whose loss had compelled the Iranian ruler to sue for peace. Finally he listed his
achievements in the name of orthodox Islam. He had persuaded his Iranian hostage,
Haidar Mirza, to renounce his wicked Shi‘a ways, he had turned the temples and
convents of the Christian ‘Kafir’ into mosques, and the numerous successes of his
general Sinan Pasha had ensured that the Kafirs were no longer likely to cause trouble

to traders and pilgrims, either on land or at sea. !31
Although pleased to receive such a prompt and detailed answer from Murad III,
“Abdallah will have been disappointed to realise that the Sultan had no intention of
attacking Iran in the near future. ‘Abdallah was planning a major expedition into
Khurasan in 1595 in order to regain lost ground, and he had hoped for a simultaneous
Ottoman attack on Iran's western frontiers. He hastened to send another ambassador
to Istanbul to try to obtain some promise of support, but when Tardi ‘Ali arrived there
in February 1595, Murad III had just died, and all the ambassador could do was to
congratulate Mehmet III on his accession. Although he was dismissed shortly
afterwards,
132 he is hardly likely to have brought back the answer which ‘Abdallah
was hoping for, as the Ottomans, who were hard-pressed by the Austrians, had just
appealed to Shah ‘Abbas for help in fighting them.
This appeal gave the Shah an unexpected advantage in his preparations for the
1595 campaign, for he knew that his western frontiers would be safe and that the
Ottomans would not try to act in unison with the khanate. Flattered by their regard for
his military capacity and delighted to note that his former enemies were having serious
difficulties, he made use of the situation to increase his prestige and to strike fear into
their hearts. Refusing to help the Sultan, he sent back the Ottoman ambassador
without the usual courtesy gifts. He announced his intention of ‘cleansing his
patrimony of Khurasan’ from ‘Abdallah and his peers, and he demanded the return of

Shirwan and all the towns which the Ottomans had taken from Iran during the
previous 25 years. Shortly afterwards, the towns in question appealed to ‘Abbas to
set them free, but he refused to take immediate action, declaring that he first had to
deal with the Bukharans and drive them out of Khurasan. He promised, however, to
deal with the Ottomans, as soon as that had been done.!94
Meanwhile, the arrival of an ambassador from Muscovy in November 1594 was
taken by the Shah as a confirmation of his growing fame and prestige. Andrei
Zvenigorodskii's presence in Kashan would certainly impress the authorities in
Istanbul and Bukhara. Shah ‘Abbas made sure that the envoy was seen by the greatest
possible number of Ottoman and Bukharan merchants on his way to the audience. He
also arranged for the gifts sent by the Tsar with his own ambassador to be displayed
during the audience, together with those sent with Zvenigorodskii, in order that
‘seeing all these, his neighbours and enemies should be seized with fear at the thought
131 Aba ’1-Qasim, Majma‘, 113a-114b.
132 Faridin Beg, IJ, 237-8. Hammer, Geschichte, Ul, 599, mentions the arrival of a Bukharan
ambassador in time to congratulate the new Sultan.

133 Pamyatniki, XX, 283-4.

‘Abdallah and ‘Abd al-Mu’min

that he had diplomatic relations with such a great ruler’.134 The letter which

Zvenigorodskii delivered to him was particularly pleasing, for the Tsar's brother-inlaw, Boris Godunov, was trying to encourage the Shah to act against Bukhara and the
Ottomans. The Muscovites had little love either for the Ottomans or for their
dangerous vassals, the Khans of Crimea, who were responsible for sacking Moscow
in 1571. As for ‘Abdallah, they strongly suspected him of supporting Kuchum who,
although he had lost his capital of Kashlyk, was still trying to prevent the Tsar from
imposing his authority over western Siberia. Muscovite soldiers and serving-men
were slowly eliminating each of Kuchum's allies in turn, building forts and towns

after each victory in order to protect their settlements.!%> In the circumstances the Tsar
and his entourage would have been delighted if ‘Abbas was able to keep ‘Abdallah
busy so as to prevent him from supplying Kuchum with soldiers and weapons.
In his letter Boris Godunov, surprisingly, made no reference to Khurasan.
Instead he appeared to believe that Shah ‘Abbas would particularly resent “Abdallah's
capture of Khwarazm, although the Safawids had only held the country for a few
years after the death of Muhammad Shaibani in 1510. Writing of the Tsar's and the
boyars' grief at the annexation of Khwarazm by ‘Abdallah, he made it appear that this
had the Sultan's backing, and referred to “Abdallah as the Sultan's henchman.
“Yurgench’ (Khwarazm), he said, ‘used to belong to (‘Abbas's) Persian ancestors

and the Tsar and his boyars all lamented the fact that such a great and praiseworthy
state as (the Shah's) should be split and stolen away’. The Tsar was ready to ‘do
anything so that the land of (‘Abbas's) ancestors be cleared of enemies’, and he

would even ‘institute reprisals against (‘Abbas's) enemies’ .13¢
While Shah ‘Abbas was receiving such encouraging offers of support,
“Abdallah's armies were fighting the Qazaqs and Kashghariya in the east. Nothing is
known about the campaign against the Qazaqs which, in a letter to Shah “Abbas, ‘Abd
al-Mu’min described as a punitive expedition. But it must have taken place in the early
part of 1594, if in February 1595 a Qazaq ambassador was able to assure the
Muscovite authorities that his people had been at peace with Bukhara for some time.
However, Tawakkul was still thirsting for revenge against ‘Abdallah. Realising that
his men

and their bows and arrows were no match for the Bukharan

army, he

offered, through his ambassador, to become the Tsar's vassal if he was given the
firearms which he needed against ‘Abdallah.137
Far more is known about the Kashghariyan campaign, although its motives are
not clear, and the accounts available are vastly different. ‘Abdallah had many
grievances against the rulers of Kashghariya. He remembered angrily that they had
supported Mirza Sulaiman and Shahrukh and that in 1586 ‘Abd al-Karim refused to
surrender the rebel Mu’min Sultan. He also was concerned that the ambitious new
khan, Muhammad, who had campaigned against the Qirghiz near the rivers Chu and
Talas in autumn 1591, might try to annex that area, and thereafter become his
neighbour. In 1594 he probably heard that several Princes were at loggerheads with
the khan, and when these Princes appealed to him for help, ‘Abdallah decided to
intervene in order to install one of them on the throne as his protégé.

134 Thid., XX, 257.
135 Istoriya Sibiri, Ul, 31-35.

136 Pamyatniki, XX, 236-7.
137 Aba ’1-Qasim, Nuskha, 240b. Kazakhsko-russkie otnosheniya, 3. Materialy, 292. The Qazaq
ambassador arrived in Moscow in late January after a journey of some 11 weeks.

1583-98

The first to rebel was the khan's nephew, Khudabanda Sultan,!38 who seized

Jalish and Turfan in the east with the help of Tawakkul in 1591, while the khan was

campaigning in the west, near the Chu and Talas. Muhammad took no action for
some years, for he was busy consolidating his hold on the central provinces of his
realm, but in 1594 he marched and retook both towns. Although he made no effort to
seek out his nephew on this occasion, Khudabanda must have expected a punitive
expedition to be launched the following year, and he may well have appealed to
“Abdallah for help at this juncture.
Muhammad had not punished Khudabanda because he was also having trouble
with two other princes. One was his brother, Abi Sa‘id, governor of Kashghar and
Yangi Hisar, the other was his nephew, Shah Haidar Muhammad Sultan, governor of
Khotan and son of the previous khan. Abi Sa‘id, to whom Muhammad had given full
authority over Kashghar and Yangi Hisar in 1591, had found, to his bitter disappointment, that the khan had changed his mind and was attempting to deprive him of
all effective power. He pretended to accept the first two officials appointed to
Kashghar, but seems to have appealed for help to ‘Abdallah and to Shah Haidar
Muhammad Sultan, both of whom responded at once. Confident that they were on
their way to help him, he then refused to receive the third official appointed by the
khan, and the khan marched to force him into submission, only to be told en route

that the Bukharan army was marching on the country.
If Abu Sa‘id and his Bukharan allies hoped that Muhammad would then return to
defend his capital, Yarkand, they must have been disappointed, for he continued to
Kashghar and arrived there at about the same time as Shah Haidar Muhammad. The
khan wasted no time in organising the defences of the country and Abi Sa‘id was
made to help. Troops were rapidly gathered, scouts were sent out to report on
Bukharan movements, and Shah Haidar Muhammad was put in the care of a loyal
official. By the time the Bukharan forces arrived in late 1002/August-September

1594, their potential allies were thus out of action and unable to help.139
The Bukharan army, said to have been 100,000 strong, was led by ‘Abdallah's
brother Distim, his cousin Uzbeg Sultan and the Qalmagq qish begi, Khwajam Quli,
who had recently helped ‘Abdallah to conquer Khwarazm. The prospects for the
Kashghariyans seemed bleak. But the Bukharans could no longer rely upon their
allies, they were a great distance from home, their resources and supplies were
strained to the limit, and they had lost the advantage of surprise. The fight for
Kashghar was therefore fierce and inconclusive. After a few days the Bukharans
decided to make a bid instead for Yarkand. A body of men hurried over and
demanded the town's surrender. The inhabitants, who had been taken by surprise,

promised to comply, on condition that they were given twenty-four hours’ grace to
make adequate preparations for the surrender. The delay was crucial, for it enabled
Muhammad Khan to get there during the night. What happened next is a matter for
speculation. All the sources agree that a battle was fought and that shortly afterwards
the Bukharans returned to the khanate. But whereas Shah Mahmid Chiras, whose
ancestors fought for the Kashghariyans, insists that the Bukharans were crushed and
chased out of the country, losing a total of 40,000 men, Mahmid b. Wali of Balkh
and others say that, owing to the insubordination of his vassals, Muhammad was
forced to retreat into the town. Then the Bukharan army devastated the countryside
138 He was the son of Quraish Sultan, q.v. supra. Shah Mahmid, 127.

139 Shah Mahmid, 52b-54a, also p. 286n.143.

‘Abdallah and ‘Abd al-Mu’min

around Yarkand and left the country.14

Muhammad Khan had not been removed from the throne, but ‘Abdallah cannot
have been dissatisfied with the results of the campaign, for the Kashghariyan ruler
abandoned any idea which he might have entertained of attacking the khanate. He also
gave up his attempt to demote Abi Sa’id, and even allowed Shah Haidar Muhammad
to retain Khotan after a six months’ probationary period, during which he was kept
under surveillance. Although he dealt far more harshly with his nephew Khudabanda,
this was because the young man rebelled again, some time after the Bukharan
campaign, taking Jalish and Turfan once again, apparently with the help of Tawakkul.
Muhammad Khan sent his brother, ‘Abd al-Rahim, to govern the area and deal with
Khudabanda. The young man was handed over to ‘Abd al-Rahim by his latest allies,
the Qalmagq, and during the journey to Yarkand Khudabanda died, probably in late

1595.14!
There appears to have been no further contact between Kashghariya and Bukhara
during the remainder of ‘Abdallah's reign. Muhammad Khan made no further
attempts to impose his authority on the territory near the Chu river, nor did he seek
revenge by supporting any of ‘Abdallah's enemies. As for ‘Abdallah, he did not try to
interfere again in Kashghariya.
x
Meanwhile ‘Abd al-Mu’min prepared for the next round in Khurasan, his father
having relented, and agreed to let him march into the province in 1595. This time,
however, the Prince would not have a free hand. His father would follow and would

take up his winter quarters in Marw in preparation for a campaign into ‘Iraq (Iran

proper) the following year.!42 While the Kashghariyan campaign was in progress
‘Abd al-Mu’min wrote an aggressive and over-optimistic letter to Shah ‘Abbas in
which he prematurely listed Kashghariya among the lands under Bukharan control.
He accused the Shah of having marched to Khurasan in 1593 despite previous
agreements and for very little profit, this being a reference to a little known and minor
campaign by ‘Abbas against ‘the town of Tepe’(?) which, according to
Zvenigorodskii's informants, the Shah seized while ‘Abdallah was campaigning in

Khwarazm.!43 ‘Abd al-Mu’ min then demanded that the Khwarazmian Princes be sent
to his father's Court (for punishment), or at the very least expelled from Iran. Finally
he intimated that there would only be peace and friendship between them if the whole
of Khurasan, from as far as Semnan in the province of Qumas, was surrendered to
him and left undisturbed.
As might be imagined, Shah ‘Abbas took violent exception to this letter. He was
particularly concerned about the request for part of Qumas, for this appeared to be in
earnest, Bukharan marauders having caused havoc near Bistam in 1594.144 In his
answer the Iranian ruler tried to impress the Prince by listing the many provinces
under his control and the latest successes of his troops in Gilan and Mazandaran. He
also gave a slightly improved version of recent events in Khurasan, accusing ‘Abd alMu’min of cowardice and falsehood. The Prince, he said, had fled from Isfara'in and
Mashhad, instead of standing his ground and fighting. He had secured the departure
140 Thid., 53a, 54a-b. Bartol'd, Sochineniya, VIII, 176. Aba ’1-Fadl, Akbarnama, 556, says the
Bukharans were defeated.

141 Shah Mahmid, 176, 55a, 288 n.55. Bartol'd, Sochineniya, VIII, 176-7. Khudabanda's second
rebellion probably began in 1594 and ended in 1595-6.

142 Aba ’1-Qasim, Nuskha, 240b.

143 Thid., 233b-4a. Hajji Mir, 150b-1b, Pamyatniki, XX, 286.
144 Iskandar Beg, 506.

1583-98

of the Iranian army by false promises (in the autumn of 1592), in order to come back
when the coast was clear (several months later, in the spring of 1593). If he wanted to

become (a worthy) ruler, then he must show patience and stamina and not flee before
his enemy. Shah ‘Abbas would follow him to Balkh and give battle. Khurasan
belonged to Shah ‘Abbas and he was determined to reinstate the Khwarazmian
Princes. The letter closed with an ominous warning: if ‘Abd al-Mu’ min did not return
Khwarazm to them, the Khwarazmian Princes would be sent to ravage the khanate

with an army of 200,000 and the ensuing devastation would be remembered ‘on the
Day of Judgement’
.145
Shah “Abbas made careful preparations for the forthcoming campaign. First, he
dismissed the governor of Damghan and Semnan for his inadequate response to the
Bukharan raids carried out in Qumas in 1594. Next he put the area under the control
of Farhad Khan whom he sent there from Qazwin in April 1595. At this stage the
Shah informed Zvenigorodskii that the amir was on his way to fight ‘Abdallah, and
that he himself would be following soon. In fact, however, Farhad Khan took up his
summer quarters at Firuzkuh in Qumas and the Shah remained in Qazwin. It was only
after he was told in June that ‘Abd al-Mu’ min was besieging Isfara’in, that he sent out
orders for an army to be gathered. His preparations were still incomplete a month later
but he realised that further delay would damage his reputation. He therefore left
Qazwin for Khurasan, joined forces with Farhad Khan at Firuzkuh and, marching at
speed, he reached Bistam a mere 20 days later with an army said to be 20,000
strong.!46 From Bistam he wrote to the governor of Isfara'in, urging him to hold out
for one more week, then he resumed his march.

A few days later he wrote again to ‘Abd al-Mu’min. He accused the Prince of
having come to Khurasan in 1594 only to leave, as he had done more than once
before, on hearing of the arrival of the Iranian army.!47 He announced that he was on
his way from Bistam. It behove the Prince as a descendant of Genghis Khan to wait
for him and fight. If he did not, he might as well forget his dreams of ruling the

world. 148
When the governor of Isfara’in received the Shah's letter he asked “Abd alMu’ min for seven days' grace, saying that he wanted to put his affairs in order before
surrendering the town and Abd al-Mu’min granted his request. Shortly afterwards he
received the Shah's challenge. He was anxious to take up the challenge, but his amirs
were divided. Some thought that the Shah's letter was a fake, sent by Farhad Khan,
others strongly advised him to retreat. The Prince's situation had vastly changed since
he had sent off his own challenge to the Shah in early 1595. His troops were tired
after more than two and a half months of siege, and he was unlikely to receive any
reinforcements. Not only had ‘Abdallah left Marw to deal with an attempt by Hajjim
Khan and his sons to recover Khwarazm, but ‘Abd al-Mu’min could not count on
help from either his cousin or Qul Baba Kukeltash. He was on bad terms with both of
them and they were too far away to be able to help. According to the contemporary
Sistani writer Shah Husain, Din Muhammad had been banned from entering
145 Aba ’1-Qasim, Nushkhat, 234a-5a. Hajji Mir, 151b-4a, seems erroneously to place this exchange
of letters in 1598. Pamyatniki, XX, 285. According to the Muscovite envoy to Iran it was
‘Abdallah whom the Shah challenged to a meeting on the battlefield.

146 Pamyatniki, XX, 277, 279. Iskandar Beg, 506-7. Abi ’I-Qasim, Nuskha, 240a.
147 Interestingly enough Iskandar Beg does not mention any such excursion by the Prince in his very
detailed account of Shah 'Abbas's reign.

148 Iskandar Beg, 507-8. Abi ’I-Qasim, Nuskha, 239b-40b.
83

‘Abdallah and ‘Abd al-Mu’min

Khurasan for two years, possibly as a punishment for having remained threateningly
near Qandahar at the time when ‘Abdallah was trying to come to an arrangement with
Muzaffar Husain. As for Qul Baba, he was anxiously watching developments on the
frontier with India. In April 1595, when Mughal troops were known to be on their
way to take Qandahar, the people of Garmsir and Zamindawar had rebelled against
their Bukharan overlords. Although the rebellion was soon quashed, the troops
involved had gone on to attack the province of Qandahar, thereby providing the new
Mughal governor of the town, Shah Bik, with just the excuse he needed to engage
them in battle. He cleared them out of the Qandahar province and later answered a
plea for help from the people of Zamindawar and Garmsir by driving all the Bukharan
troops and administrative officials out of the two provinces.!49 This was an
unpleasant development which Qul Baba was unable to reverse without help, and,
aware that Shah Bik might well decide to march next on Herat, Qul Baba was keeping

his forces in readiness.15°
‘Abd al-Mu’min decided to send out a reconnaissance party to find out whether
the Shah was really on his way to Isfara’in. His men clashed with the Iranian army at
Jajarm, many were killed and taken prisoner, but a few of them managed to return
and to report to the Prince. On hearing their news ‘Abd al-Mu’min made a last attempt
to persuade the governor of the town to surrender, and when he refused the Prince
left for Mashhad in order to regroup his forces. Shortly afterwards, Shah “Abbas
entered Isfara’in, but on 21 August, only ten days later, having made no attempt to
pursue the Prince, he was on his way back to Iran.
The reason for ‘Abbas's sudden change of heart is hard to understand in view of
his threatening letters to “Abd al-Mu’min. The Shah's biographer, Iskandar Beg, tries
to blame Farhad Khan for the decision, claiming that his arguments convinced the
Shah who was debating whether or not to march on Mashhad. Farhad Khan is
supposed to have said that the aim of the campaign, viz., the relief of Isfara’in, had
been accomplished. The Bukharan side had been defeated, he added, and ‘Abd al-

Mu’min had once again disgraced himself by fleeing. As for advancing on Mashhad,
this might only lead to a defeat, or else ‘Abd al-Mu’ min might decide to flee, in which
case he would probably sack the town first, thus causing further hardship to the
inhabitants.
These arguments are hardly likely to have carried much weight with the Shah,
except for the suggestion that his march on Mashhad might lead to a reversal of
fortune. Shah ‘Abbas was aware that he lacked the artillery and the expertise
necessary for a successful siege, and that ‘Abd al-Mu’min might retreat into the town,
refusing thereafter to come out and fight. A more important reason for his decision,
however, might have been a letter sent to him by ‘Abd al-Mu’min from Mashhad.
After challenging the Shah to battle and saying that he would follow him, if
necessary, to Iran, “Abd al-Mu’min announced that ‘Abdallah would be setting up his
winter quarters in Marw and that he was coming equipped for a three-year campaign.
Shah ‘Abbas had no wish to meet ‘Abdallah in battle, and even less to face the
combined forces of ‘Abdallah and his son. However, he wrote back saying that he
was on his way to Mashhad. He also accused the Prince of being a coward, told him
that his reputation was at its lowest ebb, and challenged him to stand and fight. But
149 Shah Husain, 358. Abi ’1-Fadl, Akbarnama, Ill, 668-9.

150 Thid., 672. The situation became even more worrying in September 1595 when it was heard that
large quantities of food had been sent to Qandahar.

1583-98
after despatching this face-saving letter he at once left Sabzawar, travelling in the
opposite direction towards Astarabad where he intended to deal with the troublesome

Geraili.151
When he arrived near Astarabad Shah ‘Abbas learnt that ‘Abdallah was in fact in

Khwarazm, and that ‘Abd al-Mu’min had set siege to Sabzawar. This placed him a
quandary. Although he had saved Isfara'in effortlessly in August, simply by
marching there, Shah “Abbas was not eager to turn back and try to save Sabzawar.
According to Iskandar Beg his army had already decreased in size, those whose
horses were unfit for further action having been sent back to Iran. The Shah was
reluctant to face “Abd al-Mu’min with depleted forces. He also felt sure that ‘Abd alMu’min would have acquired fresh troops in Mashhad. While he hesitated, Sabzawar
fell and the inhabitants were savagely slaughtered by order of ‘Abd al-Mu’min, in
reprisal for their behaviour towards their Bukharan honorary garrison two years
earlier. Shah ‘Abbas heard that the governor was still holding out in the citadel,

although hard-pressed by ‘Abd al-Mu’min who was pounding the walls with an
enormous cannon called Jahangir, and he decided at last to intervene, if only for the
sake of his good name which was sure to suffer if he took no action.
He marched back rapidly, but failed, once again, to confront ‘Abd al-Mu’min.
For when the Prince heard that he was approaching he raised the siege of the citadel
and returned to the khanate. He probably knew that the approaching Iranian army was

quite large and bent on revenge.
152
Shah ‘Abbas was left with the melancholy task of burying the dead, after which,
thoroughly dispirited with the result of his campaign, he returned to Qazwin, giving
up the idea of either retaking Nishapur or pacifying Astarabad. ‘Abd al-Mu’min had
more cause to be satisfied with the campaign, for he had made the Shah look foolish
and had exacted a fearful revenge on the people of Sabzawar. But he had failed to
recover any of the lost towns.
‘Abdallah had been far more successful than either his son or Shah ‘Abbas. He
had not only recovered Khwarazm, from which his various governors had been
ousted for 14 days, he had also put several of the Khwarazmian Princes out of action.
The sequence of events was as follows. In early August Hajjim Khan's sons and
nephews, who had accompanied Shah ‘Abbas to Bistam, decided to try and recover
Khwarazm without his help. Disappointed by his lack of action on their behalf, they
felt sure that success was within their grasp, for they had heard that the country was
only held by very small Bukharan garrisons. They set off accordingly, without asking
Shah ‘Abbas's permission, and were soon joined by Hajjim Khan himself. Gathering
support from various Turkmen tribes on their way, they reached Khwarazm where
they enlisted the help of a further 200 men who had just returned from captivity in
Bukhara and were on their way to trade at the Noghay settlements.
Urganj and Khiva soon fell to them, the first by assault and the second by
treachery. The Bukharan governors of these towns were at once put to death, together
with their garrisons, and when news of this slaughter reached the governors of
Hazarasp and Kat, they fled towards the khanate. Near Chahar Juy they chanced
151{skandar Beg, 508-10. Pamyatniki, XX, 110. Sykes, 259. Only after 1598, thanks to the
reorganisation carried out by the Shirley brothers, was the Shah's artillery fully reliable. Abii ’1Qasim, Nuskha, 240b-1b.
152 Mirza Beg, 287a, says it was 30,000 strong at this stage which suggests, either that there were
far more than 20,000 men when the army originally left Qazwin, or else that the Shah had
managed to gather a very large number of men in his few days near Astarabad.

‘Abdallah and ‘Abd al-Mu’min

upon the vanguard of ‘Abdallah's army, who, under the command of Khwajam Quli,
were heading for Marw where they were to take up their winter quarters. As soon as
‘Abdallah was told the news he ordered his army to change direction and make for
Urganj. His soldiers reached Hazarasp less than two weeks after the fall of Khiva, by
which time the Khwarazmian forces were depleted, the Turkmen having gone back to
their encampments with their prisoners and booty. Two battles were fought near
Hazarasp, which resulted in the death of Baba Sultan's brother and the flight of
Hajjim Khan's third son, Muhammad Quli, to the Noghays. As Muhammad Quli was
married to the daughter of one of their Princes, he probably expected to find refuge
and help in their encampments. But the Noghays did not want to endanger their newfound friendship with ‘Abdallah for his sake. They got rid of him as soon as
possible, sending him to Muscovy where he received a pension from the Tsar.!>3
Hajjim Khan and his son ‘Arab Muhammad were in Urganj when they heard of
the débdcle. They fled at once towards Qazwin and eventually arrived there, but lost
most of their men on the way. Only one of the Princes stayed behind in Khwarazm.
This was Baba Sultan, the Prince who had once attacked the Bukharan pilgrims. He
stood his ground at Hazarasp, holding out against “Abdallah himself for four months,

but when the town fell at last, he was put to death.154
Towards the end of 1595 ‘Abdallah returned to the khanate. He was then at the
peak of his power. He had asserted his authority over Khwarazm, he had little to fear
from Shah ‘Abbas who seemed fairly ineffectual, he was on good terms not only with
the Noghays and the Ottomans, but also with Kuchum who wrote during the
Khwarazmian campaign to ask for military help against the Tsar. Even Akbar, whose
conquest of Zamindawar and Garmsir had worried Qul Baba, was privately making
an effort to retain friendly relations with ‘Abdallah. As for Tawakkul, although he
was trying to organise a coalition against “Abdallah, he still acted outwardly as a good
vassal. This was due to fear of ‘Abdallah and to the presence, in his encampment, of

a Bukharan mulla whom he suspected of spying for the khan. In August 1595
Tawakkul dutifully sent on to the Tsar a commercial agent from ‘Abdallah and
pretended to have nothing to do with the Iranian ambassador with whom he had been
discussing an anti-Bukharan alliance. The ambassador was not even allowed to return
to Iran from his camp. Instead he had to go back via Muscovy, whence he had come
to Tawakkul! At the same time, however, Tawakkul sent his son Murad to Moscow

as a hostage in order to obtain weapons for use against ‘Abdallah and Kuchum.!55
Tsar Fedor was equally ambivalent towards ‘Abdallah and his people. He was
trying to develop and secure his control over Siberia by eliminating Kuchum's allies,
and building strategically placed forts and towns. But the lack of food in general, and
corn in particular, made it very difficult for his soldiers to survive there. From 1593
he had therefore sent peasants to Siberia with instructions to grow corn, and when it
transpired that their attempts had had little success, he tried to encourage Bukharan
and other traders to come there with the supplies which were so desperately needed.
In February 1595 he instructed Tara voevoda Eletskii to buy up all the goods which
153 Aba ’1-Ghazi, tr. 285-9, text 266-70. According to Iskandar Beg (510, 523) Shah ‘Abbas had in
fact allowed Hajjim Khan to try his luck in Khwarazm and had sent him off via Astarabad after
leaving Isfara'in. See Pamyatniki, XX, 414, 111, for Mamet Kul (Muhammad Quli)'s visit to
Moscow after 1595.

154 Aba ’1-Ghazi, tr. 289-90, text 270-1. Iskandar Beg, 523, says that the Prince made a stand at
Wazir and that he was finally handed over to the Bukharan army by the inhabitants of the town.
155 Materialy, 296, 294. Kazakhsko-russkie otnosheniya, 14.

1583-98

Bukharan and Noghay traders brought to the area, and to look after them so that they
might want to come back. They must not be held up in any way, and if they wished to
go past Tara in order to trade in the other Siberian towns they should be allowed to do
so. If any Bukharans came to Tara and discussed matters relating to land or to the
(political) situation in Bukhara or Muscovy, the voevoda was to report fully on their

conversation and send them back. 156

The Tsar's attempt-to welcome Bukharan traders and envoys to Siberia did not
prevent him from adopting a very hostile attitude to ‘Abdallah and his envoys. About
six or seven weeks after issuing his instructions to Eletskii he wrote to Tawakkul,
agreeing to become his suzerain and instructing him to compel ‘Abdallah and Kuchum
to ‘submit’ to Moscow. A well-equipped army would be sent to Samara as soon as
Tawakkul's son was entrusted to him, and Tawakkul would be free to lead this army

against “Bukhara, all (his own) enemies and the ‘disobedient’ Kuchum’. In the
autumn of the same year Tsar Fedor's ill will towards ‘Abdallah was clearly
demonstrated when he had two ambassadors from the khanate, Qutluq Adam from
Bukhara, and Isen Gildei (Husain Kildi) from Balkh, exiled respectively to Kostroma
and Pereyaslavl'-Zalesskii, north of Moscow, where they were detained for several

years, 157
The following year the rift between ‘Abdallah and his son appears to have
widened, much to Shah ‘Abbas's delight, for he hoped to take advantage of it in order
to regain Khurasan. In late 1595-early 1596 the Shah, who was in Qazwin, received
an embassy from Qul Baba Kikeltash, who asked permission for Bukharan pilgrims
to go to Mecca via Iran. The fact that this message, from one known to be very close
to ‘Abdallah, was sent so soon after the Sabzawar massacre for which ‘Abd alMu’ min was responsible, appeared to suggest that “Abdallah disapproved of his son's
behaviour and would not support him in future. Shah ‘Abbas hastened to send back
Qul Baba's ambassador with an envoy of his own, who took gifts and the required
permission to the amir. However, he soon realised that he had been over-optimistic
and that ‘Abdallah had no intention of relinquishing Khurasan, when later that spring
some 4,000 Bukharan troops carried out a daring raid into the heart of Iran. They
ravaged the area surrounding Yazd and took much booty, but, if Iskandar Beg is to be
credited, they lost many of their number, first when the governor of Yazd made an

unexpected sortie, and later in an encounter with the governor of Tabas Kildi on their
way back. Other Bukharan operations were more successful. In the north ‘Abd alMu’min's men penetrated as far as Astarabad, slaying many of the followers of ‘Ali
Khan Geraili. Later they took the fort of Raghad in which he had sought refuge. In
the south Din Muhammad began the conquest of Sistan with the help of his brother,

Baqi Muhammad.158
There had been trouble between the people of Sistan and Bukharan officials and
soldiers ever since the first Bukharan raid on the area in 1588. By 1591 the Sistani
Princes had agreed to pay tribute to Qul Baba, but as they were determined to
preserve their freedom of allegiance, they continued to recognise Shah “Abbas as their
suzerain as late as 1594. In June 1596 ‘Abdallah decided to impose his full authority
on the area. Din Muhammad was despatched there from Qa'in and various amirs were
ordered to follow with large numbers of soldiers. The Princes of Sistan took fright.

156 Istoriya Sibiri, U1, 32-35. Miller, I, 365-6. See further about this in chapter 15.
157 Kazakhsko-russkie otnosheniya, 8-11. Materialy, 406-7.

158 Iskandar Beg, 515, 524-6. Shah Husain, 381-2.
87

‘Abdallah and ‘Abd al-Mu’min

They sent out appeals for help, for they were well aware of Din Muhammad's
capacity as a general.
They appealed first to Akbar, for it seemed hardly likely that Shah ‘Abbas, who
had not even tried to recapture Herat or Mashhad, would send an army to defend
them. On the other hand they hoped that Akbar, who had seized Zamindawar and
Garmsir from the Bukharans only a year earlier, would intervene on their behalf.
However, they were to be disappointed. Akbar was well satisfied with “Abdallah
because he had not tried to reconquer Zamindawar and Garmsir. He had no wish to
enter into direct conflict with ‘Abdallah's armies. There was certainly no point in
antagonising the Bukharan ruler at a time when his own troops were trying to bring to
an end the latest rebellion by Jalala and the Tariki, now two years old. If Akbar
interfered with his schemes in Sistan ‘Abdallah would no doubt support Jalala. In any
case, even before the messenger from Sistan had set off for India, Akbar had
despatched two embassies to Bukhara, and it would have been unthinkable for him to

declare war against the khanate at such a time.
Akbar answered the Sistani Princes in the summer of 1596. In his carefully
worded and courteous answer he did not decline their request outright. He declared
that although he felt bound to help them because‘of their common ancestor, Timur, he
required further and better particulars. In the meantime he would ask “Abdallah to
leave Sistan to him, and he offered the Sistani tribes a home in India, if they were
dissatisfied with their rulers. This answer was hardly encouraging but, in view of the
seriousness of their plight, the Princes of Sistan tried again. They sent off a second
envoy in November-December but he gave up his mission when he heard that one of
the Princes, Jalal-al-Din, had himself set off for Iran several days earlier, to ask for

help from Shah ‘Abbas.!59
Jalal al-Din's mission was no more successful than either the Sistani mission to
India, or an earlier mission to Iran in the autumn under Malik Mu‘azzam. Although
‘Abbas I welcomed all the envoys warmly in order to emphasise his hostility towards
“Abdallah, he did nothing to help. He did not give Farhad Khan instructions to
intervene, and the Princes had to be content with a vague assurance, in late 1596, that

Shah ‘Abbas would go to Khurasan himself the
1006, i.e., some time after August 1597, or more
seems Clear from his advice to Hajjim Khan in
that he anticipated neither territorial reconquest,

following year, by which he meant
probably in spring 1598. In fact, it
1595, as reported by Abi ’1-Ghazi,
nor even any signal success while

‘Abdallah was alive. However, he did not expect ‘Abdallah, who was 63, to survive

for many years. When ‘Abdallah died he would launch a major attack on Khurasan,
for the Bukharan forces were sure to lose their unity and sense of purpose under ‘Abd
al-Mu’ min, the Prince being disliked for his cruelty, his greed and his reluctance to let

anyone but himself achieve any military fame.!6°
Shah “‘Abbas's refusal to fight the Bukharans in Sistan did not damage his
prestige, however, for shortly before Jalal al-Din's arrival he had secured a signal
success in his struggle against ‘Abdallah and his son. An official whom ‘Abdallah
had sent to Khurasan to disinter and bring back to Bukhara the ‘real’ remains of Shah
Tahmasp was bribed into giving the bones instead to Iran. This was a godsent

159 Shah Husain, 363-70. Abi ’I-Fadl, Akbarnama, Ill, 652-3, 702-3.
160 Shah Husain, 376-8. Iskandar Beg, 529. Abia ’l-Ghazi, tr. 285-6, text 266. Aba ’1-Fadl,
Akbarnama,

Ill, 736. Muhammad

Yisuf Munshi,

workers to being set into the outer walls of Balkh.

240b, says the Prince condemned

lazy

1583-98

opportunity for ‘Abbas to make ‘Abdallah and his son look ridiculous, for ‘Abd alMu’ min had boasted to the Sultan in 1589 that he had disinterred, burnt and scattered
the bones of the hated Safawid ruler. ‘Abbas made the most of his opportunity.
Although he did not believe that these were indeed his grandfather's remains, he went
out of Isfahan to welcome them, and had them re-interred with the utmost pomp and

solemnity.!6!
This cannot have increased ‘Abdallah's prestige in the eyes of the Sultan, who
was not favourably impressed when he was told in 1596 that the Bukharan
ambassador, Tardi ‘Ali, had been viciously attacked and robbed in Khwarazm. How
could this be reconciled with ‘Abdallah's announcement that he had conquered
Khwarazm in 1593? Tardi ‘Ali had probably crossed Khwarazm during the short
period, in the autumn of 1595, when Hajjim Khan had seized the country from
“Abdallah, but Mehmet III did not know this. When he sent back the ambassador in
1597, he therefore wrote to ‘Abdallah, urging him to take strong action to remove all

trace of the wicked rulers of that country.
162
Akbar's attitude was very different from that of Mehmet III.
determined to impress “Abdallah and to keep up their friendly relations
two embassies to the khanate in 1596. The first of these embassies,
generally been unnoticed by historians,!®3 was led by Mir Muhammad

He was so
that he sent
which has
Ma‘sim in
about March 1596. He brought a letter in which Akbar expressed pleasure at
“Abdallah's conquests and explained that he had kept ‘Abdallah's ambassador
(Mullah Salih Bukhari) back in India only until the Ahmadnagar campaign had come
to a successful conclusion. He was now writing to inform ‘Abdallah that after a
seven-month siege his army had taken the town of that name, although it had been

defended by some 100,000 men with 200 elephants and 1,000 horses. The immense
riches of the town, including its food provisions for ten years, now belonged to him,
as did the whole country of Ahmadnagar, whose income equalled that of the khanate
and Khwarazm put together.!®
This was a definite departure from the truth. The siege had lasted just over three
months and, although the assailants succeeded in breaching the walls, the town had
not fallen.165 Akbar had either wilfully distorted the truth in order to impress, or else
he had been misled by news that negotiations had started on 13 Isfand/3 March, two
days after the walls had been breached. In fact the walls had been repaired even
before the negotiations started, and it was only the imminent threat of starvation that
had induced Chand Bibi, sister of a former ruler of the country, to negotiate. And
because the Mughal commanders feared encirclement by Chand Bibi's allies, Bijapur
and Golconda, they hurriedly agreed terms and left within a month, accepting rich
gifts for themselves, and two promises: Chand Bibi's great-nephew, the infant
Bahadur, would recognise Akbar as sovereign, and the kingdom of Berar would be
ceded to the Emperor. In the event, however, it would soon be realised that Chand
Bibi did not regard the main fortresses of Berar as included in the deal. The Mughals
would continue to fight the rulers of Anmadnagar on and off, and only in 1603, after
the assassination of Chand Bibi, who had defended the country fiercely until then, did
the town of Ahmadnagar and its enormous riches fall to the Mughals.

161 Iskandar Beg, 526-9.
162 Faridin Beg, II, 237-9.
163 It is certainly not mentioned by Abi ’1-Fadl.
164 Bhagchand, 202b-205a.
165 CHI, III, 458-9, 462-3; IV, 142-3.

‘Abdallah and ‘Abd al-Mu’min

The second Mughal embassy of 1596 set off for the khanate on 26 Khurdad/17
June. It was led by two men, one of whom, Khwajah Ashraf, was a Naqshbandi like
the Jaibari shaikhs, and therefore likely to be particularly welcome at ‘Abdallah's
Court. The other, Shaikh Husaini of Lucknow, must have been less welcome, as he
was a Shi‘a. They brought a long and detailed letter in which Akbar did his best to
convince ‘Abdallah of his friendship. He had refused to help the Shah against the
khanate in 1594, he had purposely given Shahrukh a fief which was far from the
khanate so that the mirza could no longer threaten ‘Abdallah, and he had refused to
help the impostor, Muhammad Zaman Mirza, in Badakhshan. As for Qandahar, he
had only restored his family's control over the town the previous year in order to
prevent unnecessary Bukharan loss of life, in case they besieged the town in the
mistaken belief that it belonged to Iran. As further proof of his friendship, and
because troublemakers had thought his visit to the Punjab sinister (as far as the
khanate was concerned), he intended to leave the province, despite its pleasant climate
and pleasurable hunting, and would retire to Agra.
This must have been most gratifying news for ‘Abdallah, as was the formal
agreement included in this letter regarding the establishment of the Hindu Kush as
their common frontier, for this meant that the Emperor had renounced all claims to
sovereignty over Badakhshan. Furthermore, Akbar insisted that he knew nothing
about ‘Abd al-Mu'min's ‘improper requests’, and that he harboured no grudge
against the high-spirited young man. Finally, after advising “Abdallah to forgive
Shahrukh a young man's indiscretions, Akbar concluded his letter with an expression
of regret at the untimely deaths of the last three envoys from the khanate.
A slightly different version of this letter, recorded by the Ashtarkhanid historian
Hajji Mir, includes an account of Akbar's recent conquests in Gujarat and Deccan.
More significantly the Emperor explained that he had (simply) gone to Punjab in order
to hunt, and also to chastise the tribes which were interfering with the Indo-Bukharan

trade. 166
Akbar's protestations of friendship were particularly pleasing to ‘Abdallah
because, although he was on good terms with Kuchum, with whom he exchanged
gifts in 1595 and 1596, his relations with the Tsar and with ‘Abd al-Mu’min were not
satisfactory.
167
Tsar Fedor had not released his ambassadors and was showing marked suspicion
towards Bukharan traders in Siberia. Although he granted them new advantages in
September 1596 and told voevoda Eletskii to look after them, treat them kindly and
encourage them to return, he also insisted that a tight check be kept on their activities.
Eletskii was to ensure that Bukharans sold no zapovednye tovary to the native Tatar
population. The list of these royal prerogative goods, not available on the open
market, was constantly reviewed and covered a wide range of items, from goods in
short supply and extremely valuable to objects which were in daily use. It also
included items whose availability on the open market might constitute a security risk.
In 1596 the forbidden goods were coats of armour, sabres, knives and axes, which
would have been dangerous in the hands of potential rebels and which were therefore
not available to traders. In any case Tsar Fedor suspected Bukharan traders of
engaging in spying. He therefore made it clear to Eletskii that they must only conduct

166 Aba ’I-Fadl, Akbarnama, III, 705-10. Hajji Mir, 142b-4a.
167 Materialy, 296. He sent Kuchum kettledrums, a variety of materials and Bukharan bows, in
exchange for gerfalcons, sables and foxes.

1583-98

their activities outside the Siberian towns. If any were allowed in, so that they could
dispose of unsold goods, or because they had a diplomatic mission to perform, the
voevoda was to prevent them from examining the town fortifications, speaking to
Russians or Tatars except about trade, or finding out whether Muscovite Siberia was
short of manpower,

for Kuchum

Bukhara and the Noghays.!68

was said to be planning an attack jointly with

The Tsar was right to suspect that there was much contact between Bukhara and
Kuchum, for, not only were ‘Abdallah and Kuchum exchanging letters and gifts in
1595 and 1596, but Bukharan traders were supplying the Siberian ruler, and in
September 1596 several of Kuchum's discontented followers went to live in Bukhara,
with the intention of serving ‘Khan Obla’.!69 Muscovite fears of Kuchum were such
that, some days before the Tsar's letter was received in Tara, a patrol from the town,
sent to prevent his supporters from crossing the Irtysh into Muscovite territory,
attacked a body of men near the river, killing a number and confiscating the
belongings of the others. When it was realised that the men were Bukharan traders,
those who had intended to trade with Muscovite Siberia were given back their goods,
but the merchandise of Kuchum's would-be suppliers was kept by the Treasury. Tsar
Fedor did not mince his words: in future, he declared, soldiers would be sent against
those who tried to supply his enemy, but Bukharans coming to Muscovite Siberia
would be welcomed and exempted from dues.
This message, which was sent off to Tara on 11 January 1597, was intended as
much for the merchants themselves as for “Abdallah, who had sent two envoys to
Moscow that winter to enquire about the fate of his 1595 embassies. The second of
these ambassadors, Shaikh Darwish, had come via the Noghay encampments, a
disagreeable reminder to the Tsar that ‘Abdallah was still on good terms with them.
No return embassy was sent to Bukhara, and it seems possible that, like their
predecessors, these two envoys might have been detained in Muscovy.!70
The skirmish on the banks of the Irtysh no doubt had an adverse effect on

Bukharan trade in Siberia,!7! but the Tsar's harsh attitude towards Bukharan
ambassadors and traders failed to persuade ‘Abdallah to break with Kuchum. On the
contrary, Kuchum is said to have temporarily sought refuge in the khanate
(‘Bukhariya’) in 1597 and ‘Abdallah continued to write to him. In 1598 he even
censured Kuchum for acting unfairly towards a Noghay noble whom he had
dispossessed of his land. Reminding him of the ancient friendship which had linked
Kuchum's ancestors with the Noghays, ‘Abdallah strongly advised him to return the
land in question, lest he should ‘make the Kafirs (Muscovites) stronger’, presumably
because the Noghays would form an alliance with Muscovy. ‘Abdallah clearly
expected Kuchum to take his advice, and even seemed to hint that harmony between
them would only prevail if Kuchum complied with his wishes.!72
Meanwhile ‘Abd al-Mu’min's resentment of Qul Baba and of his father was
increasing rapidly. The chronology of his dispute with them has been difficult to
establish, because of the lack of precise dates and the discrepancy of one year
between Iskandar Beg's and Mahmid b. Wali's accounts. In establishing the
168 Materialy, 107-8. Miller, I, 150-1. See further about the Tsar's letter in chapter 15.
169 Miller, II, 168 and ff.
170 Materialy, 296-9, 406-7.

171 See further about this in chapter 15.

172 S.G.G.D., Il, 131. Ziyaev, Uzbeki, 9.

‘Abdallah and ‘Abd al-Mu’min

sequence of events a deciding factor has been the evidence of the Mughal
ambassadors, Khwajah Ashraf and Shaikh Husaini, from which it would appear that
the dispute was at its worst in August 1597, and was in the process of being settled in

September 1597, when they left Qarshi for India in the company of Mir Quraish.173

Some time in late 1596 ‘Abd al-Mu’min apparently decided to try and see his
father, who was hunting near Marw. The Prince came over with more than 2,000,

and perhaps as many as 5,000, armed men, a fact which ‘Abdallah's amirs looked
upon as a declaration of evil intent. ‘Abdallah, however, was unafraid, and nothing
untoward happened. The khan and his son spent some time hunting together, then
‘Abdallah made for Herat. Qul Baba, who had invited the khan to Herat, was obliged
to extend an invitation to ‘Abd al-Mu’min and to welcome him as warmly as his
father, but the visit was less than successful. The Prince accused Qul Baba of
embezzlement and of having secret links with Iran, and ‘Abdallah retaliated by
refusing to listen to his son, or to accept his gifts. Things improved slightly at the end
of their stay in Herat, however, and ‘Abd al-Mu’min managed to persuade his father
to visit him in Balkh.
‘Abd al-Mu’min made elaborate preparations for this visit. He even had a
bejewelled throne built for his father's use, but “Abdallah did not come. Warned that
his son might make an attempt either on his life or on his freedom, he went instead to
Bukhara. ‘Abd al-Mu’min was bitterly disappointed and determined to take revenge

on Qul Baba, whom he held responsible for his father's change of heart.!74 He
concealed his purpose, however, and it was only in 1597, several months later, that
he took a large army to Khurasan, alleging that he was on his way to visit the shrines
of Mashhad.
Qul Baba, who had recently sent the Shah's ambassador back to Iran, together
with a second envoy of his own, was not taken in. When “Abd al-Mu’min appeared
outside Herat and asked to speak to him, he barricaded himself in the town and
refused to come out. His action placed ‘Abd al-Mu’min in a predicament, for although
he could try and besiege Herat, he might fail in his undertaking, thus fatally injuring
his prestige, quite apart from losing his father's affection. In the end he decided to
return to Balkh, only to find, on getting there, that his father had already taken sides.
‘Abdallah had not only applauded Qul Baba's action, he had even sent a bow and
arrow to the governor of Herat for future use against ‘Abd al-Mu’ min.
Whether or not this report was true, ‘Abd al-Mu’min was furious and determined
to seek revenge upon his father. Hearing shortly afterwards that his father, who had
dismissed the Mughal ambassadors on 10 Murdad/1

August, had gone to hunt in

Qarshi, he marched there and tried to seize him.!75 But ‘Abdallah was warned in time
by one of his son's followers. Rising at once from the table at which he had been
feasting, he fled towards Bukhara, leaving behind his tents and his possessions.
Although ‘Abd al-Mu’min set off in hot pursuit, his father got away and barricaded
himself in the capital, refusing to hear ‘Abd al-Mu’min's explanations and excuses.
The Prince then returned to Balkh. Shortly afterwards ‘Abdallah gathered together an
army and marched towards Qarshi. ‘Abd al-Mu’min did likewise, but they were both

reluctant to come to blows. Concessions were made, therefore, and after the Prince
173 Aba ’1-Fadl, Akbarnama, III, 739. They were in Herat when they heard of ‘Abdallah's death, at
which stage Mir Quraish left them and returned to Bukhara for instructions.

174 Mahmid b. Wali (excerpts in Bartol'd, VIII, 194-5) says Qul Baba tried to blacken the Prince in
his father's eyes. Iskandar Beg, 550-1. Hajji Mir, 146a-b.

175 Ahmad b. Shams, 551, says this incident took place in Qunduz.

1583-98

surrendered his most seditious adviser to his father, peace was arranged through the

good offices of the Juibari shaikhs and others, some time around 29 Shahriwar

1006/20 September 1597, when the Mughal ambassadors left Qarshi.176
While the dispute between ‘Abd al-Mu’min and his father was escalating and
reaching a climax, Bukharan relations with Shah ‘Abbas were developing along two
different paths. On the one hand Qu! Baba Kikeltash continued to exchange friendly
embassies with him, on. the other ‘Abdallah's relations remained hostile. Qul Baba's
second envoy, who arrived in Iran in early 1597, was sent back with a second
ambassador from the Shah called Muhammad Quli ‘Arabgirli. This ambassador had
been entrusted with friendly messages for the amir and for ‘Abdallah, as Shah
‘Abbas wanted to establish good relations with the Bukharan ruler. This, he hoped,
might deter “Abdallah from taking advantage of a change of governor in Astarabad,
where the local Turkmen tribes, who were Sunnis, might welcome the armies of the
khanate with open arms.
“Abdallah took no action in Astarabad, but he did not give up his hostile intentions
towards the Shah. Much to ‘Abbas's dismay armed Bukharan groups raided Qumas
and even penetrated into the Kashan district in 1597. The first group reached
Damghan and Bistam in early spring, luring out the governor of Bistam, on whom
they inflicted a serious defeat. The second group marched from Turshiz to Kashan via
Qumas. They defeated the governor of Semnan in battle, but were later defeated

themselves by the governor of Khwar. They then had to flee back to the khanate,
leaving their booty behind, and the heads of the dead were sent to the Shah. He was
gratified to hear of this success, although equally concerned at the ease with which the
Bukharans had penetrated Iran. He sent troops to Bistam and Astarabad, appointed
new governors to defend these sensitive areas, and ordered a man-hunt for the rebel
“Ali Khan Geraili who was back near Astarabad after seeking refuge temporarily with
‘Abd al-Mu’min. After the rebel was captured and put to death, Shah ‘Abbas hoped
that Qumas and Astarabad would be safe from Bukharan raiders from then on.!77
In the meantime, an ambassador from the khanate who reached Qazwin on 15

November 1597 experienced the full force of the Shah's anger.!78 Shah ‘Abbas
stormed and raged at him throughout their interview, venting his anger at the failure
of his recent overtures to ‘Abdallah. The Bukharan answered not a word, but by the
end of the audience, which was witnessed by members of a Muscovite mission to
Iran, he had ‘turned black’ and was ‘neither alive nor dead’. The Shah had also heard
that, after three months of constant fighting, his armies had at last succeeded in

pacifying Mazandaran, but his pleasure at the news was marred when he was told that
the rebel ruler of the area had found refuge in Bukhara. He therefore heaped scorn
and abuse on ‘Abdallah and tried to strike fear into his ambassador's heart by loudly
proclaiming his own friendship with Tsar Fedor, ‘a brother...on whom we rely,
whom we praise, whose name is terrible and strikes fear in all lands’. Showing the
hapless envoy his bow, which, like that of Ulysses, no one else appeared able to pull,
‘Abbas declared that he would use it to get ‘Abdallah's head, as well as his land, after
which he would drink sherbets from the khan's gilded skull. ‘Abdallah, he continued,
was but a timid woman, a trading peasant, who always fled at his approach. When

176 Iskandar Beg, 551-3. Bartol'd, Sochineniya, VIII, 195. Hajji Mir, 146b-8a. Abi ’I-Fadl,
Akbarnama, Il, 739.

177 Iskandar Beg, 529, 532-3, 541.
178 5 November Old Style.
93

‘Abdallah and ‘Abd al-Mu’min

‘Abbas was young ‘Abdallah had seized one-third of his kingdom. Now that he saw
‘Abbas standing on his own two feet and wishing to regain his patrimony, he asked
for peace. But he would not get it. And the Shah loudly and emphatically asked Allah

to let him see ‘Abdallah's head at the end of a spear.17

Shah ‘Abbas made sure that his determination to recover Khurasan was
proclaimed far and wide. He wrote about it to Akbar in a letter carried by ambassador
Manuchihr Beg, who left for India that autumn. So far, the Shah explained,
circumstances had been against him, for he had been forced to interrupt every
previous campaign in order to deal with enemies at home or abroad. Now, however,
he had no such problems, and he vowed not to set foot in Qazwin until he had
secured his aim. He then left Qazwin, but he did not hurry with his preparations for
the campaign. He spent the winter of 1597 in Isfahan, which was not on the direct

route to Khurasan from Qazwin, not because he wanted to keep his vow, but because

he had decided to turn Isfahan, which was more central and less vulnerable to attacks
from Turkey and Bukhara, into his capital.
His verbal preparations, on the other hand, went ahead. The Sultan and the
Ottoman governor of Tabriz were informed that Shah ‘Abbas was gathering a large
army in order to ‘get the head of [his] foe the Bukharan king’. He refused either to
help the Sultan against Hungary or to accept Tabriz from the disaffected Ottoman
governor. He also declared that he would come and take Tabriz for himself after
recovering Khurasan, and would follow this up by fighting the Ottomans with the

help of the Tsar.!80
‘Abbas's threats, however, do not appear to have convinced the Sultan that his
ally ‘Abdallah II was in danger. This may have been because he received no appeal
for help from the khanate. The Bukharan ambassador who reached Istanbul in 1597
only appealed for special assistance on behalf of a Bukharan who was well connected
with Turkish clerics and who wished to reach the Muslim Holy Places. And the
ambassador who arrived there in February 1598 only brought belated condolences on
the death of Murad III and congratulations on Mehmet III's victories. The Sultan
therefore continued to fight Hungary and took no action to attack Shah ‘Abbas on
behalf of ‘Abdallah.
!8!
In December 1597 and January 1598 two more ambassadors from ‘Abdallah
reached Isfahan. Tsar Fedor's envoys reported that the ambassadors had been sent to
ask for peace. They even offered to return the Khurasani towns to Iran, but ‘Abbas
loudly refused their offer, declaring that he would come and get the towns himself.
‘Abdallah's offer was probably a ruse to stop the Shah from retaking Khurasan in his
absence. His amirs had recently been defeated by Tawakkul, and although he himself
was seriously depressed as a result of his differences with his son, he was preparing
to march eastwards against the Qazaqs. Having recalled Qul Baba and many of his
troops from Khurasan for that purpose, he knew that the province was vulnerable.
And since he was reluctant to ask his son to defend it he may have tried to buy time
through this offer to the Shah.
If this was duplicity, ‘Abdallah's duplicity was repaid in kind by Shah ‘Abbas.
Indeed, if we are to credit Iskandar Beg, at about the same time as the Shah was

ranting against ‘Abdallah for the benefit of the Muscovite envoys, he was being most
179 pamyatniki, XX, 440-2, 438.
180 Iskandar Beg, 542-3. Pamyatniki, XX, 447-8.
181 Faridiin Beg, II, 241-3. Hammer, Geschichte, Il, 636-7.

1583-98

gracious to a third envoy from Qul Baba. This ambassador, who brought the Shah a
gift of sweetmeats from Qul Baba's son's wedding, was soon dismissed. He was
sent back to Herat in the company of Muhammad Quli ‘Arabgirli, an envoy who had
just come back from there and who was thought to be a particularly persuasive,
“smooth-tongued’ diplomat. His task on this occasion was to allay ‘Abdallah's
suspicions so that Shah “Abbas could march and wrest Khurasan from his son. 182
Tawakkul's onslaught on the khanate had been carefully planned. He had begun
his preparations on hearing of the quarrel between ‘Abdallah and his son, and he
launched his attack in late 1597 a soon as he heard of the death of the then governor
of Samargqand, Turstn Muhammad Sultan.!83 When ‘Abdallah was told that
Tawakkul was besieging Tashkent, he sent an army against him, led by some of his
(unnamed) relatives. But Tawakkul was an experienced campaigner. He had learnt to
fight under ‘Abdallah's brother ‘Ibadallah, and there appears to have been no one of
equal calibre on the Bukharan side. When he met the Bukharan forces between
Tashkent and Samarqand, he inflicted a severe defeat upon them.
‘Abdallah realised that he would have to march against him himself. Gathering an
army and calling upon Qul Baba to join him, he made his way from Bukhara to
Samarqand, but the battle never took place, for Tawakkul retreated on hearing of his
approach and ‘Abdallah died shortly after arriving in Samargand.
The exact causes of ‘Abdallah's death are not clear. Most of the sources agree that
he fell ill, but Akbar's biographer says that he recovered from the illness and only
died after a subsequent banquet arranged in his honour by the influential diwanbegi
and ataliq Muhammad Baqi Bi, who was thought to have poisoned him. This
suggestion of foul play may well be reinforced by the fact that it was Muhammad
Baqi Bi who summoned ‘Abd al-Mu’ min to his father's bedside during ‘Abdallah's
illness and who was appointed governor of Samarqand straight after “Abd al-

Mu’min's coronation.184
‘Abdallah died on 2 Rajab 1006/8 February 1598 and the news of his death was
heard with relief by most of the monarchs with whom he had been in contact, for they

had kept a wary eye on his movements throughout his reign. At this stage more than
one of them was tempted to attack the khanate, but none did so. Although they all
followed events in the khanate with the greatest interest, they were still afraid of his
army and of his son.
Akbar's advisers, who knew of his lifelong ambition to retake the land of his

forefathers, urged him to take advantage of the situation. But he refused to do so and
upbraided them for their shortness of vision, knowing that it would be difficult to
justify an attack on a country with which he had only recently exchanged embassies.
182 Iskandar Beg, 547, says that Qul Baba's third ambassador arrived in late March 1598 and that the

Shah knew nothing as yet about ‘Abdallah's death. But at least part of this statement is incorrect,
for, according to the Muscovite envoys in Isfahan, (Pamyatniki, XX, 449) the Shah had been
told of ‘Abdallah's death in February. Qu! Baba's ambassador had probably arrived far earlier than
stated by Iskandar Beg, but the historian might have been tempted to improve the facts in order
to emphasize the decisiveness and speed of the Shah's response to the embassy and to the news

of ‘Abdallah's death.
183 This Prince was a half-brother of Jani Muhammad Sultan, who was ‘Abdallah's brother-in-law
and also the father of one of ‘Abdallah's most famous generals, Din Muhammad Sultan.

184 Hajji Mir, 148a, 149a. Aba ’1-Fadl, Akbarndma, Ill, 736-7. Iskandar Beg, 553, 555, 556,
disagrees with this view. He says that the amir neither liked nor trusted ‘Abd al-Mu’min, and
only invited the Prince to come to Samargand when ‘Abdallah was dying because he recognised
that he had the best claim to the throne.

‘Abdallah and ‘Abd al-Mu’min
As for Shah ‘Abbas he continued his military preparations with no undue haste, only
leaving Isfahan for Kashan on 15 April. Eleven days later he left Kashan for
Mazandaran and informed the Russian gerfalconers that he was going to fight ‘the

Bukharan monarch’. !85
‘Abd al-Mu’min's accession had been greeted with little enthusiasm by the people
of the khanate. Qu! Baba fled Samargand and tried to seek refuge in Herat, but when
he was half-way there he was compelled by one of his own protégés, Maulana Qara,
to go to Balkh and offer his services to the new ruler. ‘Abd al-Mu’min refused to
believe in the sincerity of his offer and had him investigated for alleged corruption.
The investigation having soon reached the desired conclusion, the old man was placed
in a spiked cage on a camel and taken to Samarqand. There ‘Abd al-Mu’min took a
spectacular revenge on him: he had the old man's sons killed under his very eyes
then, shooting an arrow at Qul Baba's heart, he let his courtiers finish him off. 186

On hearing of Qu! Baba's cruel fate, the Bukharan governors of the various towns
of Khurasan took fright lest a similar fate befall them because of their links with the
previous monarch. They wrote to Shah “Abbas offering to surrender these towns to
him, but Shah ‘Abbas, who was still in Isfahan, refused their offer. Posturing for the
benefit of the Muscovite envoys, he swore that he himself would come and seize the

towns by force.!87 Perhaps he was hoping for the offer to be repeated, but shortly
afterwards the governors were replaced by men of “Abd al-Mu’min's own choice.
Meanwhile ‘Abd al-Mu’min had been forced to march to the Syr-Darya straight
after his official coronation in Samarqand, in order to deal with his second cousin,
Hazara Sultan, son of Uzbeg Sultan, who had rebelled and styled himself khan.
Hazara's claim was not surprisingly supported by his own father, Uzbeg Sultan. It
was also supported by ‘Abdallah's brother Disttm Sultan and his sons, all of whom
feared “Abd al-Mu’min because of his known cruelty and his hatred of likely rivals.
“Abd al-Mu’min first marched eastwards towards Shahrukhiya and Akhsiket and then
northwards towards Tashkent. By the time he returned to Samarqand Distim Sultan
and his four sons had been put to death, Uzbeg Sultan had died of shock, Hazara

Sultan was dead, and Tawakkul had been frightened into offering his submission.188
“Abd al-Mu’min then appointed Muhammad Baqi Bi governor of Samarqand,
visited Bukhara and Balkh, and gathered a large army in preparation for an expedition
to Khurasan. Two tasks awaited him there. One was the reconquest of towns such as
Isfara’in, which had been lost to Iran in 1592. The second task, which was far more
urgent, was to put his cousin Din Muhammad out of action, for he had become too
powerful. This Prince, whom ‘Abd al-Mu’min had always hated for his military
prowess and whose father he had thrown into prison in Balkh, was even then trying
to take control of Khurasan. At the time of ‘Abdallah's death Din Muhammad was in
Sistan with his brother Baqi Muhammad. He was conducting a major campaign, the
aim of which was to reduce the remaining pockets of resistance by storming all the
fortresses systematically. The Sistani Prince Malik Mua‘zzam had gone to India for

185 Aba ’I-Fadl, Akbarnama, III, 738. "Pamyatniki", XX, 449-51.
186 Iskandar Beg, 553-5. Ahmad b. Shams, 552b-3a. Aba ’I-Fadl, Akbarnama, III, 742. Hajji Mir,
149b.
187 Pamyatniki, XX, 449.

188 Iskandar Beg, 555-6. Abii ’I-Fadl, Akbarndma, III, 742. Ahmad b. Shams, 553a. Hajji Mir,

154a-b. Mahmid b. Wali (Ethé), 51b, gives no details about 'Abd al-Mu'min's feud with his
relatives, and even says erroneously that Hazara Sultan fought the Qazaqs in the reign of 'Abd alMu'min's successor.

1583-98

help and, despite Din Muhammad's attempts to bar the road, he had reached Bust and
Qandahar. He was very well received in Qandahar, but he was not allowed to go and
see Akbar. When he returned with a detachment of troops from Qandahar he tried to

reconquer the fortress of Sabz, north of Fara, but achieved nothing.!89 Meanwhile

Din Muhammad, who had won several engagements against the Sistanis, rebelled
openly against the new khan, making a bid for Herat after hearing that Qul Baba had
been put to death.
Hajji Bi, who had succeeded Qul Baba as governor of the town, stood firm and
Din Muhammad's men were pushed back in a first engagement. But he was not
discouraged. Gathering a large army, he made ready for a decisive battle outside
Herat. He also sent the qush begi Yusuf to Shah ‘Abbas with a letter in which he
offered his allegiance and asked for support against ‘Abd al-Mu’min. Shah ‘Abbas
received this letter in Bistam, where he had been for some time. He had become spoilt
by the easy successes achieved in Khurasan in previous years and had given up the
idea of marching there on being told that ‘Abd al-Mu’ min was on his way with a very
large army. Having recovered so many towns without effort, he was not eager to
fight for the remainder of the province. He also felt unsure of his army's fighting
capacity and did not know whether the men would stand up to the seasoned Bukharan
army. He had therefore agreed to take his amirs' advice and to abandon the idea of the
campaign, after indulging in a face-saving show of anger.19
Din Muhammad's message put a different complexion on the situation. The offer
of support from such an experienced campaigner was valuable in itself. It was also
encouraging to know that ‘Abd al-Mu’min had enemies of such calibre. The Shah
decided to make the most of the situation. He sent gifts and a friendly letter to Din
Muhammad to make sure that the Prince remained well-disposed, in case his help was
needed against ‘Abd al-Mu’min’'s army. He also wrote to ‘Abd al-Mu’min, offering
to help him consolidate his power in the khanate in return for the cession of
Khurasan.
Shah ‘Abbas's letter to ‘Abd al-Mu’min was carefully worded in order to enhance
his own prestige regardless of the Prince's response, for it was important that he
should not be accused of cowardice if his offer of peace was accepted. According to
Iskandar Beg, who paraphrased this letter, the Shah began by accusing his enemy of
cowardice, to which he added a suggestion of untruthfulness. “Abd al-Mu’ min, he
said, had attacked Khurasan every year when he himself was busy in Iran and Gilan,
only to run away when the Shah made the long journey from Iran in order to confront
him. The Prince had even made the excuse that his father would not allow him to fight
the Qizilbash ruler, but now he was the ruler of Ma wara’ al-nahr and other lands and
in control of all the Uzbeg armies, (so this excuse was no longer valid).
Shah ‘Abbas went on to explain that he was determined to stay in Khurasan until
he reconquered the whole of the province. However, if ‘Abd al-Mu’min declared his
goodwill and apologised for his earlier misdeeds, he was prepared to accept the
province back (rather than take it by force) out of compassion for the people of
Khurasan who had suffered so much from the yearly Bukharan invasions. In a
further demonstration of magnanimity he promised in such a case to grant ‘Abd alMu’min a truce and even to help him consolidate his power in the khanate. The letter
ended with a further taunt and a variation on the usual threat: if ‘Abd al-Mu’min

189 Shah Husain, 387-402.
190 Iskandar Beg, 558-9, 563-4.
oi

‘Abdallah and ‘Abd al-Mu’min

refused his offer he should not run away as before, he should stand his ground and
fight as a man. If he did not, the Shah would pursue him to Balkh and Bukhara.
Well satisfied that he could cope with ‘Abd al-Mu’min's response to his letter,
whatever that might be, Shah ‘Abbas then left Bistam in the direction of Jajarm and
Mashhad. Meanwhile, in the khanate, after inspecting his large army, which included
Qazaq forces as well as troops from Farghana, Tashkent and Balkh, ‘Abd al-Mu’min
announced that he intended to purge it of many of his father's former protégés, for he

believed that they might be disloyal.!9! By this threat he succeeded in uniting against
him even those amirs who had remained loyal despite the numerous executions
already carried out on his orders. Under the leadership of Abdallah's former
Commander-in-Chief, ‘Abd al Samad Bi, they decided to kill him at Zamin, near
Samargand. Diverting the course of the river into a narrow pass, they led his horse
through it at night and, as he rode slowly through the flood, a volley of arrows rained

down upon him.!92 He died on 9 Tir 1006/30 June 1598.193 His reign had only
lasted four and a half months.
‘Abd al-Mu’min was not mourned in the khanate, nor even in Balkh, where he
had strengthened the fortress walls, built or improved several shrines and founded a

chahar su for traders. His father, on the other hand, is still remembered with affection
and admiration in much of Central Asia and modern Afghanistan
for the fame and
glory which he imparted to the khanate, for his literary achievements, his patronage of
poets and artists, for the numerous structures which he erected for the comfort of
traders and the pursuit of learning, and for the dam and the canals which benefited
agriculture in the khanate.194

191 Iskandar Beg, 559, 564-7.
192 Iskandar Beg, 557, 559. Hajji Mir, 154b-Sa. Abu ’1-Fadl, Akbarndma, III, 742. Ahmad b.
Shams, 553b. Mirza Beg, 302b-303b. Muhammad Yusuf Munshi, 241a-b.

193 Abii ’I-Fadl, Akbarnama, Il, 742.
194 Muhammad Yusuf Munshi, 240b, 234b-5a. Istoriya Uzbekskoi SSR, I, 541, 543, 545-7.

4
Birthpangs of the Ashtarkhanid dynasty

(1598-1605)

‘Abd al-Mu’min's death was followed by a period of instability and weakness in the
khanate. Several Princes contended for overall power and took over in turns until
1603 when the new dynasty of the Astarkhanids was at last firmly established.
The very choice of “Abd al-Mu’min's immediate successor was fraught with
difficulties. In Balkh the local amirs decided that ‘Abd al-Mu’min's two-year-old son
was too young to succeed. ‘Abdallah's brother-in-law Jani Muhammad Khan, father
of Din Muhammad,

who was in prison in Balkh, seemed a better choice, for it was

widely held that there were no adult Janibegids or Abulkhairids left, all of them
having died, either in battle or by execution. The amirs had nearly made up their
minds when an ambitious woman, Bani-yi “‘Uzma, arrived on the scene. She had
been married in turn to ‘Abdallah's brother ‘Ibadallah and then to ‘Abdallah himself,!

and she assured the amirs that she knew of a more suitable candidate for the throne.
His name was ‘Abd al-Amin and he was the son of “Ibadallah and a concubine. Bantyi ‘Uzma had been looking after him and had so far passed him off as a girl, in order
to save him from ‘Abd al-Mu’min. Although there was some doubt as to the veracity
of her story, the fact that her candidate was of the right age, and more closely related
to the Janibegids than ‘Abdallah's brother-in-law, swayed the amirs of Balkh, who
finally decided to proclaim the seventeen-year-old boy under her tutelage.”
Meanwhile in Bukhara a Janibegid Prince of well-established parentage and of the
right age had been found and, although he was an opium addict, he was proclaimed
khan as Pir Muhammad II. On hearing of his accession Bani-yi “‘Uzma thought it
politic to send congratulations and to recommend ‘Abd al-Amin to him as a son and
loyal supporter. This was an inspired move, for the new khan needed support and did
not want to start his reign with a struggle for Balkh. In the circumstances, and
although his amirs were convinced that the boy was an impostor, Pir Muhammad II
thought it best to confirm ‘Abd al-Amin as ruler of Balkh. Pir Muhammad's accession
was also recognised by those responsible for “Abd al-Mu’min's murder, including the
amir ‘Abd al-WAsi‘ Bi, who had taken over as governor of Samarqand.
Thus unity appeared to have been achieved, but in Khurasan another claimant to
the throne had appeared. This was Jani Muhammad's son Din Muhammad, a cultured
1 Iskandar Beg, 557. Hajji Mir, 155b-6a, says her second husband was 'Abd al-Mu'min. Muhammad
Yar, IVAN Uzb, 87a, calls her Jahan Sultan Khanum.
2 No one seems to have remembered that ‘Ibadallah had had a son named Yadgar and several
daughters. Hafiz Tanish, 237a.
3 Mahmiid b. Wali (Ethé), 5la-b. Iskandar Beg, 557-8. Hajji Mir, 156b, says that Jani Muhammad
was proclaimed in Samarqand, but this is unconfirmed.

Birthpangs of a new dynasty

man who kept calligraphers busy producing illuminated manuscripts for him.4 He had
been preparing to renew his attack on Herat when it was heard that ‘Abd al-Mu’min
had been assassinated. The governor of the town, who knew that the Shah intended
to march on Khurasan, and who believed that there was no suitable candidate in the
khanate for the position of khan, at once opened his doors to Din Muhammad. This
Prince, he thought, had a valid, if indirect, claim to the throne, for he was ‘Abdallah's

nephew. And he would certainly be capable of defending Khurasan against the
Iranian army. Din Muhammad was delighted with this turn of events. He entered
Herat, took over, and forgot all about his offer to the Shah. He did not coin,
however, in his own name. Either out of modesty, or in an attempt to conciliate his
new subjects, he chose to abide by the seniority rule of the early Abulkhairids. He
accordingly had the khutbah read and coins minted in the name of his grandfather,
Yar Muhammad Khan, whom ‘Abd al-Mu’min had expelled from the khanate, and
who arrived just then from India, where he had been living in exile.°
Yar Muhammad, who originated in Astrakhan, was the first of a new dynasty of
rulers, the Ashtarkhanids, who were to reign over the khanate for nearly 200 years,
and who were connected with the Janibegids, both Yar Muhammad and his son Jani
Muhammad having married daughters of Iskandar Khan. Yar Muhammad's reign
would be as short-lived as it was limited in scope. Not only was it limited
geographically to the province of Khurasan, but his power was purely nominal. He
was a mere figurehead, a sultan suri, and the effective power was entirely in the
hands of his grandson, who was the sultan ma‘nawi. Din Muhammad began by
making several appointments, then he sent his younger.brother, Wali Muhammad, to
take control of Marw where the governor, the yasawul Sulaiman, had installed a
puppet ruler on hearing of ‘Abd al-Mu’min's death. Wali Muhammad was able to take
over of Marw without difficulty, for Sulaiman put to death the puppet ruler when he
heard that Wali Muhammad was on his way and welcomed him into the town.7
Meanwhile on hearing of ‘Abd al-Mu’min’s assassination Shah ‘Abbas had
rejoiced and, confident that he would soon recover Khurasan, he had continued to

march towards Mashhad. Nishapur opened its doors to him, and when some 12,000
Iranian troops, whom he had sent ahead under Farhad Khan, arrived at Radkan near
Mashhad, Din Muhammad's nominee to Mashhad, Abi ’1-Muhammad, took fright.
He had intended to sack the town before fleeing, but the inhabitants managed to
persuade him to change his mind and he left for Herat. When he joined Din
Muhammad the sultan ma‘nawi was angry to hear of his cowardly behaviour. He sent
a force of 400 men to try and save the town, but they were far too late, for Farhad
Khan had been invited in as soon as the previous governor abandoned his post. When
they arrived at Turbat, they were taken by surprise by a detachment sent by Farhad
Khan and, if we are to credit Iskandar Beg, most of them were killed.8

Their commander, however, a certain sayyid Muhammad Sultan who appears to
have been related to Din Muhammad,? managed to escape and returned to Herat to
4 Oral information from Karen Riihrdanz revealed that as many as ten manuscripts which he
commissioned have survived.

5 Iskandar Beg, 559-60. Hajji Mir, 157a-b. Mahmiad b. Wali (Ethé), 40a, 53a.

8 Iskandar Beg, 567, 561-2.

° This was probably the Muhammad Ibrahim Sultan who later ruled Balkh as the Shah's protégé and

100

1598-1605

report. Din Muhammad was concerned to hear that so many men had been lost and
that Farhad Khan had reached Mashhad. But he was quite unaware, however, that the

Shah himself was in the province and rapidly approaching Mashhad. He discussed
the situation with his amirs and was given totally conflicting advice. Some thought he
should cede Khurasan temporarily to the Iranians while he went to impose his
authority on the khanate. Others maintained that it was foolish to give up the province
to Farhad Khan and an army of a mere 12,000 men. A victory against Iran could only
stand him in good stead when he marched on Bukhara. Din Muhammad accepted this
argument, but it had been advanced without any knowledge of the Shah's movements
and it was to prove fatal. The amirs' attempt to gather intelligence had failed because
the Shah had intentionally concealed his advance, travelling by a little-known route
and incognito.10
He even resorted to a ruse, just as his ancestor Ism4a‘il I had done in his last battle
against Muhammad Shaibani at Marw. In order to prevent Din Muhammad from
engaging Farhad Khan before he could join him with reinforcements, or else
remaining in Herat and strengthening the town in preparation for a lengthy siege,
Shah ‘Abbas let it be known far and wide that an Ottoman attack on Iran had forced
him to abandon his intended campaign and to recall Farhad Khan. And he instructed
Farhad Khan to begin a token retreat. The ruse was effective. Like Muhammad
Shaibani, Din Muhammad tried to pursue the retreating enemy and fell into a trap.!!
He marched about 25 km out of town with 15,000 to 20,000 men and suddenly
found himself facing Shah ‘Abbas and Farhad Khan with a combined force of 90,000

or more men.!2
The situation was serious, but Din Muhammad refused to retreat, as advised by
his amirs. Rejecting a course of action which he thought both unwise and
dishonourable, he stood his ground and fought with great courage and determination,
as did his men. During the battle, which was fought at Pul-i Salar on 6 Muharram
1007/9 August 1598, he came close to killing the Shah, but in the end he suffered a

major defeat. He lost about 4,000 men, was himself wounded and died later in
mysterious circumstances.!3 After the battle Herat fell to the Shah, who gradually retook the whole of Khurasan. Although the province stayed under Iranian control
throughout the seventeenth century, it would remain a bone of contention with

whose career will be studied below.

10 Thid., 562-3. Hajji Mir, 158a.
11 Semenov, "Sheibani", 76.
12 Mirza Beg, 303b, gives a figure of 90,000. Don Juan, 116, writes of 112,000 Iranians, and either

300,000 or 170,000 ‘Tatars’. Hajji Mir, 158a, gives no figures for the Shah's army, but says it
was enormous. Iskandar Beg's evidence (561, 565, 569, 571) is confused. He gives the total
numbers on the Iranian side as somewhere between 10,000 and 11,000 men, although between

10,000 and 12,000 were sent ahead with Farhad Khan, and the Shah also took an unspecified
number of men with him. Din Muhammad on the other hand is said to have had a force of 15,000
men at his disposal. Perhaps the historian deliberately gave a low figure for the Iranian force in

order to prove that the Shah won a decisive victory against great odds.
13 Iskandar Beg, 570-4, says he was killed either on the battlefield or by the Qaqchi tribe near
Maruchaq. Mirza Beg, 395b-307b, gives a different location, viz. Badghis, and says the deed was
done either by local tribesmen or by the Shah's supporters. Hajji Mir, 159b, places the battle a
year later. Muhammad Yusuf Munshi 243b-4b, writes that the battle lasted 3 days and that Din
Muhammad, who was separated from his brothers in the course of the retreat, was later killed near
Qunduz by the Qarai tribe. Don Juan, 116 ob., says he was killed by order of the Shah.

101

Birthpangs of a new dynasty

Bukhara, and the rulers of the khanate tried repeatedly to reconquer the province
which had been won and retained for so many years by ‘Abdallah and his son.
After Din Muhammad's defeat, his supporters and relatives fled to the khanate.
Baqi Muhammad, Yar Muhammad and Din Muhammad's sons, 9-year-old Imam Quli
and 6-year-old Nadir Muhammad, went to Maimana and Farab in the province of
Balkh, where the arrival of a large group of armed men can hardly have been greeted
with pleasure. The fact that they brought with them Yar Muhammad, who for about a
month had styled himself khan in defiance of the ruler recognised in the khanate, was
even less pleasing. However, it would appear that the old man was neither
incarcerated nor molested in any way, probably because his grandson, Baqi
Muhammad,

left almost immediately via Andkhud

for Bukhara with two of his

father's half-brothers, ‘Abbas Sultan and Rahman Quli Sultan, and a number of

soldiers.!4
Bukhara was then virtually unprotected, for Pir Muhammad and the greater part of
the garrison had gone to Uzin Saq§l, said to be half-way to Samargand, where they
were preparing to give battle to the Qazaqs. In the circumstances the people of
Bukhara refused to let Baqi Muhammad enter the town, fearing that he might take
advantage of the situation. Baqi Muhammad, who may well have intended to do so,
was forced to continue to Uzin Saqal, where he asked for an audience with Pir
Muhammad, explaining that he had come to pledge allegiance and to offer his
services. The amirs of Bukhara were relieved to know that he had come with friendly
intentions. They were particularly delighted with his offer, for the khanate was under
threat, and Baqi Muhammad had achieved renown both in Khurasan and Sistan as a
military leader and as a capable administrator. He was credited with the capture and
execution of Sulaiman Khalifa in 1591, as well as the conquest of Nimruz and the
defence of Taghrun in 1596-7.!5 They strongly advised Pir Muhammad II to receive
him and to accept his offer, which the khan did, and, as expected, Baqi Muhammad
proved a useful addition to the Bukharan fighting force in the month that followed.
The khanate had been in serious danger for some weeks. On hearing of ‘Abd alMu’min's assassination Tawakkul had attacked with a massive army, and with
terrifying success. With his brother Ishim and an army of some 110,000 men,
comprising both Qazaqs and Qalmag, he had overrun the eastern regions of Ma wara’'
al-nahr. They had taken Tashkent, Andijan, Akhsikat, and Samargand with little
difficulty, and apparently with the help and connivance of one of the men responsible
for ‘Abd al-Mu’min's murder, ‘Abd al-Wasi‘ Bi. Tawakkul had then left his brother
in Samargand with 20,000 men and marched on to Bukhara. Here at last he met some
effective resistance, for Pir Muhammad II was determined to fight. However, as he
had a mere 15,000 armed men to oppose the Qazaq ruler, he decided against an all-out
battle. He fortified the town and went out daily to give battle. On the twelfth day the
whole garrison came out with him and, after a day-long battle, they drove the Qazaqs
away.

14 Hajji Mir, 160a. Iskandar Beg, 592. Mirza Beg, 307b, says Baqi Muhammad travelled via Balkh

and Khat (not traced). Ahmad b. Shams, 554a, says he went via Qarshi to Bukhara. For the
genealogy of ‘Abbas Sultan and Rahman Quli Sultan see Mahmiid b. Wali (Ethé), 4a, 42a;

Lahauri, I, i, 218; Muhammad

Salih Kanbi, Amal, I, 305; Iskandar Beg, 592, 594. Hajji Mir,

160b- 1a, alone says these Princes were Yar Muhammad Khan's grandsons.

15 Mirza Beg, 281b. Shah Husain, 358, 379-80. The exact location of these forts has not been
established.

102

1598-1605

Tawakkul then made for Samarqand, but his brother would not let him into the
town. Ishim feared that the people would rise against them when they heard that
Tawakkul had been defeated by a force six times smaller. He shamed his brother into
turning back towards Bukhara, and marched with him, hoping to take the town. At
Uzun Sagal they met Pir Muhammad and his troops, who had come in pursuit of
Tawakkul. And during the following month several engagements took place in which
Baqi Muhammad played a prominent and very successful part. He even succeeded in
capturing and killing the traitor ‘Abd al-WAsi‘ Bi. At the end of the month Tawakkul
tried to take the Bukharans by surprise by launching an all-out attack on their camp at
night. The Bukharans, however, fought stubbornly and bravely for several hours and
finally carried the day. The defeated Qazaq army then fled to Tashkent, and
Tawakkul, who had been seriously wounded during the battle, died shortly after
arriving there.
The khanate had been saved. Pir Muhammad II rewarded Baqi Muhammad
generously for his services and left for Bukhara, hoping that his generosity would
cause the Prince to serve him loyally in the future. Not content with giving Baqi
Muhammad the governorship of Samarqand, with all its appurtenances, he also
named Yar Muhammad governor of nearby Miyankal. Bagi Muhammad then entered
into negotiations with the Qazagqs and according to Iskandar Beg and Hajji Mir an
agreement was reached with the help of the Juibari shaikhs. The Qazaqs promised not
to attack again, provided that the army of Samargand neither attacked Tashkent, nor
interfered in the internal affairs of its vilayet.!© Satisfied with his achievement, Baqi
Muhammad settled down in Samarqand, surrounded by relatives and retainers, one of
whom, his brother-in-law ‘Abdi Khwajah, was the son of the Juibari shaikh Khwajah
Sa‘d. However, if Iskandar Beg is correct, all that Baqi Muhammad had achieved

was a mere truce and he had paid for it with the partial, or total loss of Tashkent.
Even assuming that the Qazags had undertaken to pay taxes to Pir Muhammad II, thus
acknowledging him as their sovereign, the province of Tashkent, which had been
integrated by “Abdallah into the khanate after many costly expeditions, had become
virtually independent.
This version of events, however, is uncorroborated by the evidence of
Muhammad Yar b. ‘Arab Qataghan, a seventeenth century historian from the khanate.
He says nothing about Tashkent passing under Qazaq control. On the contrary.
According to him, straight after Tawakkul's defeat Pir Muhammad II sent the
Abilkhairid Prince Jahangir Sultan, then only aged ten, to govern Tashkent under the
tutelage of Muhammad Sa‘id Jalair who was appointed his ataliq.!”
In any case, peace reigned in Ma wara’ al-nahr and the danger of foreign
aggression seemed to have disappeared altogether. The Qazagqs no longer threatened
the khanate. Shah ‘Abbas appeared well satisfied with the reconquest of Khurasan,
and Akbar, who had failed to take advantage of the disarray into which the khanate
was plunged as a result of the deaths, in quick succession, of ‘Abdallah and his son,
had left the vicinity of the khanate.
Akbar's behaviour had been motivated neither by compassion for the people of
the khanate nor by generosity. In fact during the reign of “Abd al-Mu’min the
Emperor had intended to invade and seize the khanate in order to save the inhabitants

16 Iskandar Beg, 591-2. Hajji Mir, 160a-b. Mahmad b. Wali (Bthé), 51b-52b, 56a-57b.
17 Iskandar Beg, 592. Hajji Mir, 160b. Muhammad Yar, LOIVAN, 105a.
103

Birthpangs of a new dynasty

from his tyranny and to prevent any further unwarranted killings. However, although
he himself had been eager to do so, his eldest son, Salim, who was asked to lead the
expedition, proved less than enthusiastic at the idea of leaving India. Abu |-Fadl
explains that the young man ‘could not wean his heart from India’. It seems more
likely, however, that Salim was reluctant to undertake a lengthy campaign, which
might be fruitless, at a time when the ageing father with whom he was at loggerheads
might be choosing a successor to the throne.!® When Salim refused his suggestion
Akbar considered putting the scheme to Daniyal, his youngest son, but was dissuaded
from doing so. No action was taken therefore, although refugees from ‘Abd al-

Mu’min were warmly welcomed at the Mughal Court.!9
After ‘Abd al-Mu’min's assassination the unsettled situation in the khanate made a
Mughal expedition an even more attractive proposition, but Akbar did not invade, for
very practical reasons. He was well aware that he no longer had a valid pretext for
doing so. He also realised that it was far more important for him to be directly
involved in the pacification of Deccan. In any case, since the khanate was weakened
by internecine fighting, as well as Qazaq and Iranian attacks, he felt confident that its
armies would no longer threaten Kabul, Qandahar or the north-western frontier of his
realm, as they had done during the reigns of “Abdallah and his son. There was no
further need for him to maintain a strong presence in Punjab. He therefore left the area
and undertook the conquest of Deccan.
Pir Muhammad was able to heave a sigh of relief and to immerse himself in
religious practices, leaving his officials to administer a much-reduced khanate, which
had lost Khurasan, Khwarazm and also perhaps Tashkent since ‘Abd al-Mu’min's
death.
The loss of Khwarazm had an immediate, if indirect, impact on the khanate. It

happened in July 1598, about a month before the defeat of Pul-i Salar sealed the fate
of Khurasan. When Shah ‘Abbas left Isfahan to undertake the reconquest of
Khurasan, Hajjim Khan and Nur Muhammad Khan set off with him and accompanied
him as far as Bistam. Then they left to retake their patrimony. Hajjim Khan had been
provided with letters from the Shah asking the Yeqqeh Turkmen (sic) of the Atrek
area to support him, but whether they did so or not, Hajjim Khan took no immediate
action. He was reluctant to rely solely upon them, knowing that he had little chance of
dislodging the Bukharan garrisons because he had only a very small number of
trustworthy followers. He therefore remained in Astarabad, hoping for a favourable
opportunity to arise, and this came in early July when he was told of ‘Abd alMu’min's death. He then hurried to Urganj and seems to have had little difficulty in

regaining control over Khwarazm.2°
Nur Muhammad's experience was slightly different. As he had a better rapport
with the Shah, he was given a whole detachment of troops to help him regain his
patrimony. These troops had to fight in order to retake Baghabad, Nesa and Abiward
on his behalf, but Marw caused no such difficulties, for the yasawil Sulaiman
deserted his post, after which the town opened its doors. Leaving Nar Muhammad
installed in Marw his Iranian escort then returned to Herat. They brought back a
18 Akbar was then over 55 years old.
19 Aba ’1-Fadl, Akbarnama, III, 738. CHI, IV, 144.
20 Iskandar Beg, 565, 590. Aba *I-Ghazi, tr. 290-1, text 271-2, says Hajjim Khan was with the
Tekkeh Turkmen when he heard the news.

104

1598-1605

prisoner of note for Shah ‘Abbas, an eighteen-year-old Prince called Muhammad

Ibrahim Sultan, about whose origin different views have been put forward.2!

Iskandar Beg and Hajji Mir agreed that his father was called Tursin Muhammad, but
the early seventeenth century historian Muhammad Yar said his father was Suyunj
Muhammad, son of ‘Abdallah's great-uncle Bubai. Shah ‘Abbas and his official
historian, Iskandar Beg, claimed that he was a Janibegid, but if Muhammad Yar is
correct about his origin, then, although an Abualkhairid, he could not be called a
Janibegid. On the other hand, Hajji Mir, himself an Ashtarkhanid, said the Prince was
a grandson of the Ashtarkhanid Yar Muhammad Khan, and this claim is backed up by

the evidence of Mughal historians.22
In any case Shah ‘Abbas warmly welcomed him to his camp, for he hoped to use
this Prince in future in order to influence the affairs of the khanate. He left Khurasan a
month later, taking Muhammad Ibrahim with him, but did not go to Isfahan. He went
instead to Astarabad and Mazandaran, where he had to deal with local rebellions.

Having done so, he decided to remain in Mazandaran for the winter. While he was
there he sent triumphant messages to Akbar and to the Sultan to inform them of his
success in recovering Khurasan. Akbar was thanked for his earlier expression of
‘unity of purpose’ which had allegedly helped to make the victory possible.23 And
Mehmet III was sent the keys of the towns conquered in Khurasan, no doubt in order
to strike fear into his heart. The Ottoman ruler, whose information about the khanate
continued to be out-of-date,24 was particularly sorry to hear that his Bukharan allies
had lost Khurasan, if only because his Iranian counterpart made it clear that the
Ottomans were next on his list. Shah ‘Abbas's delight at the recovery of Khurasan
was such that he remitted taxes in the capital for one year and forbade local tax
surcharges everywhere. He even went so far as to abolish the valuable sheep-tax in
Khurasan, as a token of his gratitude for the help given to his army.
At this stage the khanate lost yet another province conquered by ‘Abdallah. This
was Badakhshan. Early in 1599 two impostors who alleged that they were,
respectively, Shahrukh's son Muhammad Zaman Mirza, and his uncle Humayun,

took over and shared the government of the province. In order to gain support for
their cause they coined in Akbar's name and sent him an embassy with a gift of
horses. Muhammad Zaman Mirza may have pretended that he had gone back to live
among the Hazarjat tribes after putting to death the governor of Kabul, Qasim Khan,
in 1594.26 But Akbar knew this to be false, for the previous impostor of the same
name, who had indeed murdered Qasim Khan, had been taken and put to death at the
time. However, he accepted Muhammad Zaman Mirza's gifts, his story and his
apologies for this misdeed. He was happy for Badakhshan to be once more under his
protection but, as he took no action to impose his direct control over the province, the
21 He was possibly identical with the Muhammad Sultan sent by Din Muhammad to retake Mashhad
in 1598. See supra.

22 Iskandar Beg, 576-7. Hajji Mir, 156b-7a. Muhammad Yar, LOIVAN, 103a. Mirza Beg, 310b,
merely says he was a descendant of Abi *1-Khair. Lahauri, II, 447.
23 Iskandar Beg, 578-88. Abu ’1-Fadl, Akbarnama, III, 749.
24 Steensgaard, "The Asian trade revolution", 323. Faridin Beg, II, 241. The Sultan had actually
written to ‘Abdallah several months after his death!

25 Iskandar Beg, 587.
26 Aba ’1-Fadl, Akbarnama, III, 652. The previous impostor had lived with the Hazarjats for some
time.

105

Birthpangs of a new dynasty
seriousness of the situation was not perceived in the khanate.?7 In fact the loss of the
province appears to have gone virtually unnoticed and nothing was done to regain it
during Pir Muhammad's reign.
In the spring of 1599 Shah ‘Abbas made ready to return to Khurasan, avowedly
in order to perform a pilgrimage at Mashhad. In fact there were other reasons for his
journey. He hoped by his presence to prevent any Bukharan attempt to reconquer the
province. He also wanted to obtain precise information on the situation in the khanate
in order to decide whether the time was right for putting forward Muhammad Ibrahim
as a candidate for the throne. Finally he wanted to help Nur Muhammad assert his
control over the Uzbegs of the Naiman tribe who had earlier collaborated with “Abd
al-Mu’min against him.
Shah ‘Abbas left Isfahan in about May. On his way he received two unexpected
messages from the khanate. Both had been sent on by Nur Muhammad Khan and
both of them requested the return of Muhammad Ibrahim to the khanate. The
messages, however, were very different. The first was from Pir Muhammad II who
had realised that the Shah must have an ulterior motive for treating the young man as a

favourite rather than a prisoner. He therefore asked for Muhammad Ibrahim to be sent
back, adding that he loved him as a son, which seemed to suggest that he would make
him his heir. The second message came from the amirs of Bukhara. They complained
about Pir Muhammad's inefficiency as a ruler and asked for the Prince to come and
rule the khanate as the Shah's vassal. Since this fitted in exactly with Shah “Abbas's
wishes, he at once sent the Prince to Marw, but took the precaution of asking Nur
Muhammad to keep the young man there until a suitable guarantee was received from
the amirs of Bukhara. The Shah then continued on his way to Khurasan, but by the
time he reached Semnan he was told that Pir Muhammad had died fighting Baqi
Muhammad.28
The sequence of events was apparently as follows. Baqi Muhammad had soon
aroused the anger of his suzerain by holding court in Samarqand and raiding the
neighbouring vilayet in order to increase the area under his control. Pir Muhammad
had marched to discipline him but a battle was avoided when the Prince apologised,
protested his allegiance and promised to mend his ways. Shortly afterwards,
however, the discontented elements in the khanate began to rally around Baqi
Muhammad and when he was refused the town of Sagharj, north-west of Samarqand,
as an additional source of revenue for his retainers, he rebelled openly, taking Dabusi
in Miyankal and putting to death its governor. Pir Muhammad then gathered an army
of 40,000 men, asked for reinforcements from Balkh, and as soon as 10,000 men
arrived from Balkh he marched on Samarqand. Bagi Muhammad did not come out at
once to confront the enemy. His forces being much smaller, he chose to keep them
inside the town, although he sent contingents out several times a day through the
various gates, in order to confuse the enemy. Satisfied that this had been achieved
Baqi Muhammad came out to fight the following day and a major battle took place
near the western gate of the town in the course of which a large number of Pir
Muhammad's amirs defected. Then a sortie through the northern gate was ordered
under Baqi Muhammad's uncle Rahman Quli. This broke Pir Muhammad's centre.
The khan himself was wounded and taken prisoner, and he was put to death shortly

27 Tbid., 751.
28 Iskandar Beg, 590-1.
106

1598-1605

afterwards.
Following Pir
contingent fled the
calling in at Qarshi
they took to Balkh.

Muhammad's death his army split into two. The Bukharan
battlefield, but the Balkh troops retired in a more orderly fashion,
to pick up Pir Muhammad's infant son, Muhammad Salim, whom
The following day Bagi Muhammad made a triumphant entrance

into Bukhara and took over as ruler, or rather as sultan ma‘nawi, for, like his brother

before him, he chose to have the khutbah read in the name of their grandfather, Yar
Muhammad Khan. This appears to have happened in late 1007/July 1599. Pir
Muhammad's reign had lasted only a year.?9
Baqi Muhammad's rule was at once acknowledged in the khanate. He was
warmly welcomed in Bukhara, and even the Qazaqs and the governor of Balkh, ‘Abd

al-Amin, thought it best to send their congratulations.39 Shah ‘Abbas, on the other
hand, decided to have him replaced. On hearing the news he left Semnan for
Mashhad, but fell ill on the way at Kalpish,?! and was out of action for a month.
Whenhe recovered he at once interviewed an official from Ma wara’ al-nahr who had
recently arrived in Kalpush and who was said to have been responsible for Pir
Muhammad II's accession. This official, whose name was Khudai Nazar Bi, had

originally fled to Bukhara after the khan's execution. But, when he realised that the
local inhabitants were ready to welcome Baqi Muhammad, he had left for Khurasan.
When Khudai Nazar Bi explained to him that the governor of Balkh, ‘Abd alAmin, was thought to be an impostor, Shah ‘Abbas decided to install Muhammad
Ibrahim in his place. The people of Balkh were sure to rally round him in preference
to “Abd al-Amin. They might even help him to topple Baqi Muhammad and conquer
Ma wara’ al-nahr in due course. If, however, he was unable to replace ‘Abd al-Amin,
Muhammad Ibrahim could try to form an alliance with him in order to fight the
usurper, Bagi Muhammad. They could then restore the Janibegids to the throne of the

khanate.32
Shah ‘Abbas went on to Isfara’in, but before he could begin to put his plan into
action, an embassy from Balkh arrived in the town. Bani-yi “‘Uzma and the amirs of
Balkh had become worried about Baqi Muhammad's intentions. Baqi Muhammad had
so far shown little interest in ‘Abd al-Amin. He had ignored the young man's
message of congratulations and had even failed to confirm him in his post as governor
29 Iskandar Beg, 592-4, places Pir Muhammad's death in the year of the Pig, ie. 1007-8 (March
1599-March 1600), and more precisely after the Shah arrived in Semnan, having left Ispahan ‘after
the end of the Spring, when the corn had come to harvest’ (ba'da az ingiddi ayam bahar keh
mahsulat behasdd rasid). This would probably make it about June or July 1599, for the harvest

would have taken place in May, and the end of the spring is generally dated 22-23 June.
Muhammad Yar (LOIVAN, 105a) on the whole seems to support such a date, for he places Pir
Muhammad's death in 1007 (before 23 July 1599) and says (103b) that Muhammad Ibrahim, who

was installed in Balkh several months after Pir Muhammad's death, began his reign in 1008

(between July 1599 and July 1600). However, it should be noted that in another version of his
manuscript (IVAN Uzb., 70b) Pir Muhammad's death is dated both in 1006 and in the Year of the
Mouse (1008-9, or March 1600-March 1601). Mahmid b. Wali (Ethé), 58b-61a, gives no date for
his death. Ahmad b. Shams, 554a-b, places it in the year of the Dog, i.e. 1006-7, or before 20

March 1599. Akhmedoy, "O vremeni", says Pir Muhammad went on reigning until 1601. This is
partially confirmed by Hajji Mir (160b-1b) who places the khan's death in 1009/July 1600-July
1601, but he wrote over a hundred years aftr the events in question.
30 Iskandar Beg, 595.

31 Not traced.
32 Iskandar Beg, 591, 595-6.
107

Birthpangs of a new dynasty

of Balkh. Although this was hardly surprising, since ‘Abd al-Amin had sent troops to
fight him at Samarqand, Banu-yi ‘Uzma and the amirs feared that Baqi Muhammad
might seek to deprive Balkh of the virtual independence which it had enjoyed since
‘Abd al-Mu’min's death. They accordingly sent an embassy to Shah ‘Abbas asking
for his support and for Muhammad Ibrahim to be sent to Balkh.34
Shah ‘Abbas was delighted with their request. After conferring on the young man

the titles of khan and of honorary son,>4 he gave him a document stating that he was
entitled to rule the khanate. Then he sent him off towards Mashhad together with
Khudai Nazar Bi, whom he attached to Muhammad Ibrahim in the dual capacity of
ataliq and diwanbegi. He gave them two letters to deliver in Balkh. The first letter was
for ‘Abd al-Amin. It was very affectionate. Shah ‘Abbas called him ‘son’ and
declared that he had decided to forget his grievances against the Janibegids. He would
restore this dynasty in the khanate by supporting its last two representatives, i.e.,
‘Abd al-Amin and Muhammad Ibrahim, in their attempt to recover their patrimony.
The second letter was addressed to the amirs of Balkh whom Shah ‘Abbas advised to
show their gratitude to the descendants of Jani Beg by helping the Princes against the

usurper.
‘
By the time Muhammad Ibrahim had reached Mashhad, however, the Shah had
changed his mind. He would not part with his valuable protégé until he was sure that
he could trust the people of Balkh. It would also be advisable for his army to gather in
Herat, so that it could intervene on the Prince's behalf, if necessary. He therefore kept
the Prince in Mashhad, where he joined him for the winter, and he entrusted his
letters to Ruhallah Beg Dhu ’1-Qadar whom he sent to Balkh with Banit-yi ‘Uzma's
returning ambassador. Shah ‘Abbas then went to Herat from whence he wrote to
Hajjim Khan and Nur Muhammad, asking them to come over so that they could work
out a common plan of action against the khanate.
Ruhallah Beg returned some time in April 1600. He told the Shah that his letters
had caused much heated argument among the people of Balkh. Some were in favour
of accepting Muhammad Ibrahim, others did not want him at all. In the end they had
decided to allow him to come over, but only if he agreed to the following conditions:
he must behave towards ‘Abd al-Amin as towards an elder brother, taking his orders,
doing obeisance to him, and accepting whatever territory was allotted to him by this
Prince. He must also agree that after the reconquest of the khanate he and ‘Abd alAmin would reside separately, one of them in Balkh, and the other in Bukhara.
According to Iskandar Beg, ‘Abd al-Amin tried to soften the impact of these
conditions by sending a letter in which he addressed Muhammad Ibrahim as a beloved
brother. Nonetheless the Shah was highly displeased. However, he finally decided to
accept these conditions because he wanted his protégé to gain a foothold in the
khanate, and Muhammad Ibrahim was sent on his way. He was accompanied by
Khudai Nazar Bi and by an armed escort led by the governor of Mashhad, Budagh
Khan. He was told to follow his ataliq's advice in everything and to maintain good
relations with ‘Abd al-Amin until further notice. An envoy was sent ahead with
friendly letters for ‘Abd al-Amin and for the people of Balkh, in which the Shah
33 Iskandar Beg, 596. Mahmiid b. Wali (Ethé), 62b, says that the amirs of Balkh invited Muhammad
Ibrahim to come over because the administration of the province was in chaos. Similarly
Muhammad Yusuf Munshi, 244b, claims that the invitation followed the breakdown of law and
order in the province.
34 NB. The young man was only 10 years his junior.

108

1598-1605

offered his army's assistance for the reconquest of the khanate. He also suggested
that the people of Balkh come out en masse to welcome Muhammad Ibrahim, but his
suggestion proved distasteful to them and only a small delegation went to meet the
Prince at Maimana.
After speaking to Muhammad Ibrahim, the delegates realised that he would not
keep to the conditions agreed and that he might refuse to do obeisance to ‘Abd alAmin. In the circumstances a number of them thought that the negotiations should be
called off and they returned to Balkh. The remaining delegates raised strong
objections to the idea of the young man travelling all the way to Balkh with an Iranian
military escort. Muhammad Ibrahim should be handed over to them, they said, and
they ‘would do what was best for Balkh’. Their request was referred to the Shah,
who was displeased by its obvious implication of mistrust. He wrote to protest that
neither his protégé nor he himself had any designs on Balkh. He also asked for a
written undertaking that Muhammad Ibrahim would lead the campaign to reconquer
the khanate, and that he would be supported in this task by the amirs of Balkh as well
as “Abd al-Amin. The required document was accordingly sent to him, and when he
received it, together with a verbal assurance that many of the amirs would prefer to be
ruled by Muhammad Ibrahim, the Shah at last instructed his protégé to complete his
journey.
Muhammad Ibrahim's Iranian escort left him at an agreed place outside Balkh
where a delegation from the town was waiting to welcome him. The people of Balkh
were there too, as was “Abd al-Amin. The people had come out of curiosity, but
according to Iskandar Beg ‘Abd al-Amin was there under duress, having received
clear instructions to attend from the amirs and from Banu-yi ‘Uzma. He then made a
serious blunder: he dismounted first to greet his alleged relative, an action which
implied that he was inferior in rank, and Muhammad Ibrahim was quick to take
advantage of his blunder. He forced his rival to kneel down in obeisance, then he
rode into the town in triumph. So much for Iskandar Beg's version which portrays
“Abd al-Amin as a puppet ruler and a naive, inconsequential young man. A very
different picture is drawn by an historian from the khanate, Muhammad Yar,
according to whom ‘Abd al-Amin was far more capable than his youth might have
warranted. He had won many battles, crushing all the amirs who sided with Baqi
Muhammad and imposing his authority on Tirmidh and Shiburghan. He had also
dealt with a claimant to the throne of Badakhshan who called himself Mirza
Humayan, and it was only after the greater part of his army had abandoned him that
he was obliged to dismount and approach Muhammad Ibrahim on foot, whereupon he

was killed almost immediately
.*5
To return to Iskandar Beg's version, he says that ‘Abd al-Amin was murdered
that night, and that the following day Bani-yi ‘Uzma tried to curry favour with
Muhammad Ibrahim. She pretended that she had always meant him to rule Balkh and
had used ‘Abd al-Amin as a stopgap, but her protestations fell on deaf ears and she
was sent off to Mecca.
Muhammad Ibrahim had become the de facto ruler of Balkh from about June or
July 1600. His patron, the Shah, was delighted to hear that the young man had taken
over the town, and that he was recognised throughout the province, from Maimana to
Badakhshan, and even as far as Hisar Shadman, north of the Amu-Darya. Baqi

35 Iskandar Beg, 598-601. Muhammad Yar, IVAN Uzb., 87a-89b, LOIVAN, 122a-4a.
109

Birthpangs of a new dynasty
Muhammad, on the other hand, was less than pleased when told of the takeover, and

particularly displeased to hear that the new ruler of Balkh was in daily touch with the
Shah.
Since Pir Muhammad's death Bagi Muhammad had been busy consolidating his
hold on the khanate and dealing with administrative matters. He had appointed
relatives to various towns in the khanate, sent an embassy to Muscovy, and put down
two rebellions in the eastern regions.3© The embassy to Muscovy had come about as
the result of recent changes in the situation in Siberia. ‘Abdallah's ally, Kuchum, had
died some time after his defeat at the hands of the Muscovites in August 1598. Most
of his relatives had been taken prisoner and the part of Siberia which he had ruled was
now under Moscow's control. In the circumstances, and as it was unlikely that the
Kuchumites would ever regain power, it seemed wise, in the interests of trade, for
Baqi Muhammad to try and renew relations with Muscovy. The fact that ‘Abdallah's
ambassador Qutlug Adam had been sent back to the -khanate by Boris Godunov in
1600, only two years after his accession to the throne, seemed a good omen. Baqi
Muhammad therefore sent an ambassador off to Moscow some time between
September 1600 and September 1601.37 Nothing is known about this embassy, but it
seems unlikely to have been successful, although it has been alleged that the envoy

was sent back during 1601.38
Boris Godunov was certainly not well-disposed towards the people of the khanate
and their ruler. On the contrary. In 1598 he had ordered the expulsion from Ufa to
Kazan’ of a number of Bukharan traders, on the assumption that they had conspired
to defraud the Treasury because they had allowed their Bukharan guests to leave the
town without paying their trade dues. And once they arrived in Kazan' they were kept
there, unable to leave for the khanate, much to the embarrassment of the local
voevoda who wrote in 1601 to ask for further instructions.
In 1600 Boris Godunov had tried to conclude an alliance with the Shah which
was partly aimed at Bukhara. The first clause of the treaty of alliance which his
ambassador, Zasekin, presented to the Shah, was an undertaking that the two rulers
would act jointly against each other's enemies. Although the enemies in question were
not listed, it is significant that both Zasekin, and later Romodanovskii,

were

instructed to find out whether Shah ‘Abbas exchanged ambassadors and gifts with the
rulers of Turkey and Bukhara, and whether their relations were cordial. Boris
Godunov also wanted to know the relative strength of the three armies, the towns
which the Sultan and the khan might have taken from the Shah, and the likelihood of
war in the near future. Lengthy instructions to this effect were given to both
ambassadors. Boris Godunov considered Bukhara as a threat, perhaps because he
knew that the ruler of the khanate had kept in touch with Kuchum's descendants in
Siberia.° He therefore took no chances, and when the new chief of the Noghays,
36 Iskandar Beg, 601. Mirza Beg, 310b-311a. Mahmid b. Wali (Ethé), 62a.

37 Opisi, 173 ob. Materialy, 406-7. The date given for the arrival of this envoy, Adnash in
Muscovy is 109, i.e. 7109 or 1601, but at that time the Muscovite year started three months
early, i.e., in September.

38 Materialy, 406-7. Although 1601 is given here as the year of his dismissal, the compilers of this

book do not give any source for their information other than the Opisi or the article by Belokurov
in Chteniya in which only his arrival date is stated.

39 Pamyatniki, XX, 101, 30-1, 52, 136-9, 146-50. Miller, I, 168 and ff. In March 1601 a party of
18 Bukharan traders were actually sent to offer Kuchum's son Kanai the governorship of the town

110

1598-1605
Ishterek,

who

had taken

over from

Urus

Muhammad

in 1600, asked

for his

protection, he made him promise that he would have no relations with a number of
monarchs, among whom the Sultan and the ruler of Bukhara were specifically
mentioned.49
But to return to the rebellions in the eastern regions of the khanate, they had
Started in Andijan in the spring of 1600 and were followed by an attack on Ura Tipa.
Both were led by a certain Kildi Muhammad Sultan who came over with Qazaq troops
and who, according to Mahmid b. Wali, falsely claimed to be a Suyanchid Prince.
The governor of Ura Tipa appealed to Baqi Muhammad for help. He sent his brother

Wali Muhammad there via Farghana, and after several battles outside Ura Tipa Kildi
Muhammad was put to flight.41
Now that the eastern regions had been pacified, it was time for Bagi Muhammad
at last to assert his authority over the provinces of Badakhshan and Balkh. The news
of Muhammad Ibrahim's accession made this a matter of great urgency. He set off for
Balkh in the autumn of 1600, but first he decided to reduce the other towns of the
province. He started by besieging Jaghaniyan and Hisar Shadman, then governed by
three Janibegid Princes who supported Muhammad Ibrahim. Mahmid Sultan and his
sons “Ubaidallah and ‘Abdallah tried to resist but the towns soon fell to Bagi
Muhammad. The Princes managed to get away, however, and they fled to Balkh
while Bagi Muhammad made a bid for Tirmidh. Tirmidh was in fact secured without
a fight, thanks to Baqi Muhammad's brother-in-law, ‘Abdi Khwajah Juibari, who
used his influence as pir (spiritual director) of the governor's grandfather and

persuaded the governor to surrender.*?
Meanwhile,

in Balkh, Muhammad

Ibrahim had become

an autocrat. Giving

himself up to a life of pleasure, he made no effort to conquer the remainder of the
khanate, as Shah ‘Abbas intended him to do. He decided to dispense with the mentor
whom Shah ‘Abbas had provided for him and had Khudai Nazar Bi put to death. He
soon lost the affection of his subjects when they found that people were killed every
night in the streets and markets of the town, apparently on his orders. By the time
Baqi Muhammad had retaken Hisar Shadman in late 1600-early 1601, Muhammad
Ibrahim had fallen ill. Whether or not, as claimed by Iskandar Beg, his resistance had
been weakened by his intemperate life, he developed a fever, then measles and
smallpox set in, and he died. His tenure of office had lasted less than six months.*3
His supporters at once took up arms on behalf of the Janibegid “Ubaidallah
Sultan. They tried to fight off the forces which Bagi Muhammad sent ahead with Wali

of Sabran.

40 Novosel'skii, 38. Howorth, I, i,1041.
41 Mahmid b. Wali (Ethé), 62a-b, 73a. Ahmad b. Shams, 545a,
Prince called Kildai in 973/1565-6, but he was the son of the
‘Ali, and the historian makes no connection between him and
rebellion he appears to place in 1602. No other reference to such

558a, mentions an Abulkhairid
Kichkinchid Prince Jawanmard
Kildi Muhammad Mirza whose
a Prince has been found.

42 Mahmid b. Wali (Ethé), 63b.
43 Iskandar Beg, 605-6. Mahmid b. Wali (Ethé), 63b-64b. Ahmad b. Shams, 556b. See Muhammad

Yusuf Munshi, 244b-5a, for a more fanciful version of the fall of Balkh, in which the people of
Balkh found and decapitated Muhammad Ibrahim when Wali Muhammad arrived outside the town.

Muhammad Yar, LOIVAN, 103b-4a, says Muhammad Ibrahim reigned over a year. He left Balkh
on hearing that Baqi Muhammad was besieging Hisar Shadman, and he fell ill and died outside the
town.

bia

Birthpangs of a new dynasty

Muhammad, but the people of Balkh were unwilling to fight for a ruler unacceptable
to Bukhara. They wanted to share in the glory and prosperity which the rule of a man
of Bagi Muhammad's calibre would bring to the khanate, and they looked forward to
being governed by his brother. The greater part of “Ubaidallah's troops accordingly
defected to Wali Muhammad who had no difficulty, therefore, in taking the town.
‘Ubaidallah's remaining supporters, led by the diwanbegi Yar Muhammad Bi, fled to
Iran. They took with them Pir Muhammad's son, Muhammad Salim, and a young
Prince aged about 13 called Jahangir Sultan, who, according to Muhammad Yar, had
been appointed to Tashkent by Pir Muhammad in 1598 and to Shiburghan by “Abd alAmin a year later, after the death of Pir Muhammad.*4 But “Ubaidallah and his
brother stayed behind. They made their peace with Baqi Muhammad and he allowed
them to resume the governorships of Jaghaniyan and Hisar which they were still

holding in 1605.45
Baqi Muhammad spent 40 days in Balkh, inspecting the town and putting its
administration in order. While he was there he had to deal with a rebellion by two
Princes, his uncles ‘Abbas Sultan and Rahman Quli, who had refused to help Wali
Muhammad fight for Balkh. Their rebellion was as unexpected as it was distressing,
for these Princes had so far supported Baqi Muhammad. Rahman Quli had even
captured Pir Muhammad II on his behalf during the decisive battle which led to this
khan's execution. After taking over the khanate Baqi Muhammad had rewarded his
uncles for their services by naming ‘Abbas Sultan governor of Shahr-i sabz and
appointing Rahman Quli to Khuzar. They had seemed happy with their lot, but they
now objected to the idea that Wali Muhammad, who had done nothing of note in
1599, should receive the greater prize of Balkh. They marched towards Samarqand
with the intention of besieging this town, but gave up their plan after one of their
retainers was killed. They fled towards Jaghaniyan and the Amu-Darya, but were
captured on their way, and it is not known what fate befell them.
Wali Muhammad's formal accession to Balkh then took place, after which Baqi
Muhammad left Balkh.4® Instead of going to reconquer Badakhshan, as originally
planned, he returned to Bukhara where he had a rather unpleasant duty to perform: he
had to ask his grandfather to step down as sultan stiri. Yar Muhammad had little

option but to agree, for he had incurred his grandson's displeasure by showing
excessive partiality towards the recent rebels. If, as claimed by Hajji Mir, Muhammad

Ibrahim was Yar Muhammad's grandson and had coined in his name,47 then Yar
Muhammad's loyalty would have been suspect for some time. According to Mughal
sources he had become rather cold towards Baqi Muhammad and had favoured
instead ‘Abbas Sultan and the descendants of Jani Muhammad's half-brothers. He
had even bribed officials and amirs on their behalf. This, clearly, could not be
tolerated and Yar Muhammad must have been pleasantly surprised by the mildness of
his punishment, for he readily agreed to abdicate ‘for reasons of ill health’ in favour
44 Iskandar Beg, 605-6, says Jahangir Sultan was the son of a certain Sayyid Muhammad and a
relative of Muhammad Ibrahim's from Shiburghan. Muhammad Yar, IVAN Uzb 1505, 70b-7 1a,

says this Prince was descended, like Muhammad Ibrahim, from Bubai Sultan, grandson of Aba ’1Khair, which makes him an Abilkhairid, although not a Janibegid.

45 Mahmiid b. Wali (Ethé), 78a.

46 Thid., 62a, 65a-b. Khuzar has not been traced.
47 Hajji Mir, 156b-7a. The theory that he did so (Burton, "Who were the first Ashtarkhanids?", 4878) is accepted as possible, although not conclusively proven, by Davidovich, in Korpus, 148.

1598-1605

of his son Jani Muhammad. Jani Muhammad then took up his position and appears to
have caused no difficulties to his son, who effectively ruled unimpeded in his

name.‘48

Meanwhile Shah ‘Abbas had fallen out with his old friend Nar Muhammad Khan.
The background to their dispute is as follows. As mentioned above, he had
summoned Nur Muhammad and Hajjim Khan to Herat in the spring of 1600 to decide
their joint policy towards the khanate, but neither of these Princes had appeared.
Hajjim Khan did have a valid excuse, for he had set off towards Herat and had fallen
ill on the way, but Nur Muhammad had not even attempted the journey and had
remained in Marw. About three months later, when Muhammad Ibrahim was at last
on his way to Balkh, Shah ‘Abbas had written again to Nur Muhammad, inviting him
to come over, in order to renew their friendship and silence gossip-mongers. But
once again Nur Muhammad had made excuses and disappointed the Shah. The fact
was that Nur Muhammad had changed his mind about accepting the Shah as his
suzerain and had even become actively hostile towards his benefactor. He had written
to “Abd al-Amin advising him not to let the Shah's protégé enter Balkh, and warning
him that Shah ‘Abbas intended to take the province for himself.
When these letters were found by Muhammad

Ibrahim and sent on to Isfahan,

Shah ‘Abbas was reluctant at first to take action against his former friend. But after
Nur Muhammad marched on Abiward for the sole purpose of removing one of his
own governors whom he suspected of being too partial towards Iran, his foolish act
of hostility sealed his fate. Shah ‘Abbas marched to Abiward and Marw, took both
towns, annexed the province, and sent Nur Muhammad

Khan off to Iran in exile.

Thus ended Khwarazmian control over northern Khurasan. Nar Muhammad never
regained his independence. But he was not badly treated in Iran. In recognition of
their former friendship he was not arrested, and Shah ‘Abbas even provided a

generous pension for him and his family.49
When Shah ‘Abbas returned to Isfahan that winter and heard of Muhammad
Ibrahim's untimely death and of the fall of Balkh to Bagi Muhammad he may have
been disheartened at the failure of his efforts to influence events in the khanate. But he
was determined to try again, and soon he found a new cause to support. He decided
to champion the two Abulkhairid Princes who had fled Balkh and whose claims to
rule the khanate were just as good as Muhammad Ibrahim's, if not better. A few
months after the fall of Balkh, in late March 1601, the refugees from Balkh arrived in
Isfahan. They were warmly welcomed and given food (sheep, grain, rice, cooking
oil), as well as money for their use. The following day they presented Shah “Abbas
with a valuable diamond from the shrine of Imam Rida in Mashhad, which ‘Abd alMu'min had removed in 1589,°° and in return they were given houses in Qazwin and
estates producing a suitable income for their needs. Shah ‘Abbas also vowed to install
Pir Muhammad II's son and Jahangir Sultan in the khanate, with the help of Allah and
..his own army.

48 See further in Burton, "Who were the first Ashtarkhanids"? Lahauri, I, i, 218. Muhammad Salih
Kanbi, ‘Amal, 305. Mahmid b. Wali(Ethé), 61b.

49 Iskandar Beg, 597-8, 601-5. Hajji Mir, 162b, only says that Nur Muhammad was slow in
answering the Shah's summons.
50 Iskandar Beg, 610. Hajji Mir, 164a-b. Out of religious prejudice the Shah refused to return the
contaminated diamond to the shrine. He had it sold instead and used the money in order to endow
the shrine with land.

ills}

Birthpangs of a new dynasty

Later that year Shah ‘Abbas went again to Khurasan. This time he completed a
pilgrimage to the shrine of Imam Rida on foot, in order to show his devotion, as well
as his attachment to the province. He remained in Mashhad all winter trying to plan
his next move against the khanate, and was pleased to hear from the new governor of
Marw, Bektash Khan, that Bagi Muhammad had written to him, expressing friendly
feelings for the Shah and asking for pedigree horses. Taking these overtures to imply
that Bagi Muhammad wanted to make up their former differences, Shah “Abbas
instructed Bektash Khan to send over a number of fine horses and gifts. These orders
were duly carried out and some time later Bektash Khan's ambassador returned to
report that he had been well treated in the khanate.°! On hearing this news Shah
‘Abbas decided to establish direct contact with Bagi Muhammad.
The ambassador chosen for this mission was a former Bukharan, Jan Muhammad

Bik. He was very attached to the Shah, for he had been well treated at his Court ever
since his capture in Khurasan some 9 years earlier. He was also thought to have some
influence over Bagi Muhammad, because he had once been Din Muhammad's
diwanbegi. He carried a letter in which, by a careful blend of threats and promises,
the Shah hoped to persuade Bagi Muhammad to relinquish his hold over Balkh. He
also insisted that the Princes whom he wished to support were all descendants of
‘Abdallah II's grandfather Jani Beg, although this was only true of Pir Muhammad II
and his son.
Mentioning first the age-old feud between the Safawids and Janibegids, Shah
‘Abbas said that he had acted with great magnanimity towards Muhammad Ibrahim.
Instead of ill-treating the young man when he was captured, he had befriended him
and had even installed him in Balkh on the understanding that this Janibegid Prince

would be his vassal.>2 Baqi Muhammad,

on the other hand, had acted most

improperly in seizing Balkh at the death of Muhammad Ibrahim. He ought to have
consulted the Shah before taking action. Shah ‘Abbas had no wish to annex Balkh,
but he wanted the two Janibegid Princes who had recently found refuge at his Court
to be given control of the province.53 Baqi Muhammad, who owed much to
‘Abdallah, should repay his debt of gratitude by giving the province to these
descendants of ‘Abdallah's family. If he did so, the young men would obey him like
an elder brother, Allah would be pleased, Baqi Muhammad would become famous,
and (last but not least) the Shah would love him as a brother and would always be
prepared to help him. However, if Baqi Muhammad refused to comply with his
wishes the Shah would make every effort to help his protégés, and the matter would
then be in the hands of Allah.
Shah ‘Abbas had completely misjudged Baqi Muhammad if he thought that he
could bully him into complying with his wishes. Perhaps rumours that Baqi
Muhammad had pleaded with Pir Muhammad II to avert a decisive battle at
Samarqand had made him appear faint-hearted. But this was not so. The
Ashtarkhanid, who was a year older than the Shah, had only made overtures to
Bektash Khan and, through him, to his master, because he needed to be sure that
Balkh was safe from attack before trying to reconquer the only part of the khanate

51 Iskandar Beg, 612-3.
52 This was incorrect for, although Muhammad Ibrahim may have been an Abilkhairid or even an
Ashtarkhanid (see above) he was certainly not a Janibegid.

53 Only one of these, viz., Muhammad

Salim, was a Janibegid. The other, Jahangir Sultan,

descended from the Abulkhairid Prince Bubai, and not from Jani Beg.

114

1598-1605

which was still outside his control. The situation in Badakhshan had become very
serious and needed his attention. Two years after the so-called Muhammad Zaman
Mirza had taken over this province, he had either died or been killed, leaving his coruler Humayin in charge. On hearing of his death, a nephew of Akbar's half-brother
Muhammad Hakim, whose name was Badi‘ al-Zaman, had come over from Hisar,
where he may have been living. He killed Humayin in battle on 13 Khurdad 1009/3
June 1601, took control of Badakhshan and then declared his allegiance to Akbar by
having the khutbah read and coins issued in the Emperor's name. Although in doing
so he was only following the example of his predecessors, his action was
considerably more dangerous for the khanate, for there was no doubt about his

parentage and, through him, Akbar could acquire a valid claim to Badakhshan.*4 It
was therefore essential for Baqi Muhammad to intervene in Badakhshan. However,
he was not prepared to do so at the risk of losing Balkh, and rather than accept the
high-handed proposals included in Shah ‘Abbas's letter, he decided to shelve the
problem of Badakhshan for the time being.
He answered the Shah by keeping Jan Muhammad Bik in the khanate as one of
his amirs. Then he instructed the erstwhile ambassador to write to ‘Abbas on his
behalf. According to Iskandar Beg's paraphrase of this letter Baqi Muhammad
protested that the Princes had left the khanate against his wishes. He insisted that he
felt nothing but fatherly love for them and that when they were sent back he would
look after them, giving them towns appropriate to their needs. This suave and
conciliatory message was sent to Mashhad with Jan Muhammad Bik's escort, but it
carried no weight with the Shah, for he received another, and very different, message
from the luckless ambassador. Jan Muhammad Bik urged him not to send back the
Princes, for they would not be given Balkh, and Baqi Muhammad would deal with
them in whatever way he thought consistent with the good of the khanate.
Shah ‘Abbas was furious at the failure of his plan to obtain Balkh from Baqi
Muhammad. He now tried to persuade the amirs of Balkh to support Muhammad
Salim in his claim, as son of Pir Muhammad II, to the town and to the whole of the

khanate. But they too rejected his overtures. Conciliation and agreement having
failed, Shah ‘Abbas decided to force his wishes on the people of the khanate: he
would strike terror into them with his newly-reorganised army and his powerful new
artillery, and he would take Balkh by force. In the early months of 1602 he therefore

summoned the refugees from Qazwin and began to gather an army.°>
Bagi Muhammad did not remain idle while the Shah prepared his expedition. He
settled a number of nomadic tribes in Jijektu and Maimana in order to strengthen the
frontier with Khurasan, gathered an army of his own, and announced to his people
that he intended to avenge his brother Din Muhammad (by fighting the Shah).
Unfortunately, the nomads were not a match for the detachment which the Shah sent

to the area. In the spring of 1602 many were killed, many more were captured, and
the countryside around Jijektu was ravaged by the Iranian troops. It was at this stage,
according to Iskandar Beg, that the Shah decided to put Jahangir Sultan on the throne
of Balkh. If this was indeed the case, it may be that he considered Muhammad Salim
too young to cope with such a dangerous post. Or else he intended to keep his
54 If Aba ’1-Fadl (Akbarndma, III, 792) is to be credited, the army which Badi’ al-Zaman led into

Badakhshan was in fact Akbar's army.

55 Iskandar Beg, 614. Mahmid b. Wali (Ethé), 68a. Haji Mir, 164b-5a. Sykes, 259-60.
115

Birthpangs of a new dynasty

valuable protégé safe until after the complete defeat of the Ashtarkhanids, when he
would install him in Bukhara, as the most suitable candidate for the khaqanship.

Shah ‘Abbas accordingly gave Jahangir Sultan the title of khan, together with
letters of appointment to Balkh, in the belief that these letters would carry enough
weight with the local tribes to make them rally round the young man. Then in April
1602 he set off to install his nominee as ruler of Balkh. They marched with an army
of 40,000, an artillery corps of 10,000 musketeers, some 300 cannon and such a host
of camp-followers that the men are said to have had difficulty in seeing each other
through the dust they displaced.
The Iranian army marched in the heat of the day, as the Shah wanted to avoid the
dangers of marching by night. On his way he persuaded the people of Andkhud to
surrender after promising to spare both the inhabitants and the garrison. The
governor, Mu’min Bi, was taken to him and he explained that he had no territorial
ambitions over Balkh and that he only wished to secure the region for the two
Janibegid Princes whom he sponsored. He then sent Mu’ min Bi to Baqi Muhammad
with a gift of perfume, the volatile nature of which was meant to symbolise the
transient character of the Ashtarkhanid's dreams of power. The governor was also
asked to convey an offer of peace to Baqi Muhammad in exchange for the surrender

of Balkh.>®
As was to be expected Baqi Muhammad ignored this offer. He made his way to

Balkh via Qarshi with 20,000 men,57 while the Shah installed Muhammad Salim as
governor of Andkhud, left him there with a guardian and a garrison of 150, and
marched on towards Balkh. His progress was extremely slow, the army covering
only 7-10 miles a day. This was apparently intentional, for he hoped, by his leisurely
pace, to convince the local people that he was coming, not as a conqueror, but as the
protector of the rightful rulers, whom he wished to reinstate. His policy, however,
did not pay off, as only 10 to 15 men from Balkh came to swell his forces. But the
heat and the lack of provisions took their toll on his army, and by the time they
arrived outside Balkh 20 days later, many of his soldiers were suffering from
dysentery, as well as fatigue.
The two armies met en route and clashed briefly, after which both sides
entrenched themselves near Balkh. Baqi Muhammad had the stronger position, for he
stood just in front of the town walls and benefited from local support, good
provisioning and plenty of pure water. However, as his army was by far the smaller,
he decided not to risk an all-out attack, and played a waiting game. For his part, the
Shah was in no position to take the initiative. Knowing that he had little hope of
success, he waited for Baqi Muhammad to make a move. And eventually Baqi
Muhammad did make an inspired move, with a new and carefully-worded letter to
Shah ‘Abbas. In this letter he reiterated his request for the two Princes, promising that
if they were sent to his Court, ‘together with other Uzbeg Princes they could be
happy in (his) shadow’. He also threatened to attack if his request was refused and
made it clear that an Iranian defeat outside Balkh would totally ruin the Shah's

reputation.>8 Shah ‘Abbas was so struck with the last argument that he decided not to
56 Iskandar Beg, 619-24, Mirza Beg, 311b.
57 Shah Husain, 469, gives the approximate size of the two armies as 120,000 Iranians and 70,000
Bukharans.

58 Hajji Mir, 165b.
116

1598-1605

take the risk and, although he got his army into battle order, he forbade the men to
fight. Bagi Muhammad followed suit and for a month the two armies simply faced

each other.59

The respite did not improve the condition of the Shah's army. It became severely
depleted in numbers, as the starving men were attacked by a variety of diseases. The
hungry soldiers even took to eating the leaves of the tamarisk, as well as other
unsuitable foods, and this had a devastating effect on them. It was soon clear that they
would be unable to fight a decisive battle. In the circumstances, and as Balkh showed

no signs of abandoning its Ashtarkhanid rulers, Shah ‘Abbas was compelled to give
up his plans and to return to Iran. The campaign had been a fiasco, with enormous
loss of life and valuable equipment. Furthermore it had greatly damaged Shah

‘Abbas's prestige, for both his diplomatic and his military offensive had failed.6°
The retreat began two and a half months after the campaign had started. His
demoralised army withdrew slowly and cautiously towards Iran in the full heat of
summer.®! Two days outside Balkh the Iranians clashed with a detachment of
Bukharans who came to harass them, possibly against Baqi Muhammad's orders.
The Iranian camp was plundered, but later the assailants were ambushed near the river
Khutab and lost quite a number of men, a success which Iranian historians probably
exaggerate out of all proportion, in describing it as a major victory.62 The army
continued to Andkhud, and when they arrived there Shah ‘Abbas hit on a measure
which made him popular with his soldiers, but which cannot have improved his
reputation, and which Iskandar Beg tries hard to explain away. The Shah quite simply
went back on his earlier promise that he would spare the inhabitants’ lives and
property in return for a large fine. Taking revenge upon them for the failure of his
campaign, he had them rounded up and distributed among his soldiers, and they were
taken to Iran as slaves.
The fighting, however, was not over. More Iranians were lost soon afterwards in
clashes near Shiburghan. The Shah and his army were thankful when, after razing the
fort of Jijektu to the ground and strengthening the fortifications of Maruchaq on the
frontier with the khanate, they reached Mashhad around September 1602.7
Now that the Iranian danger was over, Baqi Muhammad was at last free to
intervene in Badakhshan, and he did so as soon as the Shah left the province of
Balkh. Leaving his father and his grandfather respectively in charge of administration
and religious affairs in the khanate, he marched to Badakhshan. Badi‘ al-Zaman at
once wrote to Akbar to ask for a supply of weapons, but the 20 camels loaded with
weapons supplied by the Emperor arrived too late to save him, as did a letter in which
59 Iskandar Beg, 624-6. Ahmad b. Shams (557a) and Hajji Mir (166a) disagree, saying, respectively,
that this stage lasted 40, or only 20 days.

60 Iskandar Beg, 624-6. Mahmid b. Wali (Ethé), 66a-67b. Hajji Mir, 165a-6b. Ahmad b. Shams,
556b-7b. Mirza Beg, 312a-3a.
61 Iskandar Beg, 626, says the retreat started on 9 Muharram 1011/29 June 1602, but it probably

started some two and a half months later if Mahmid b. Wali (Ethé, 66b) is right in placing the

beginning of the campaign in early 1011/after 21 June. Shah Husain, 469, says the whole
campaign lasted 7 months.
62 Iskandar Beg, 626-7. Mirza Beg's colourful account (313a-b) cannot be fully relied upon, for he
says that the Bukharan side lost 6,000 men, out of a total of 4,000!

63 Iskandar Beg, 628-30. Hajji Mir, 166b-7a. Mahmiid b. Wali (Ethé), 68a-b. Ahmad b. Shams,
557b. Mirza Beg, 312b-3b. According to Steensgaard (The Asian trade revolution", 231) the Shah
was in residence in Mashhad in September 1602 when Gouvea arrived there.

117

Birthpangs of a new dynasty

Akbar promised Baqi Muhammad his friendship if he gave up his attempt to
reconquer the province. Baqi Muhammad and his brother Wali Muhammad had
wasted no time. They had besieged Qunduz, where Badi‘ al-Zaman had taken refuge,
taken the town on or just after 12 Shawwal 1011/25 March 1603, and had the Prince
executed.64 Bagi Muhammad also made an example of Badi‘ al-Zaman's supporters
by inflicting cruel punishments on them. Then, after adding Badakhshan to his
brother's holding of Balkh, he returned to Bukhara, well satisfied with his

achievement.®5
Nonetheless he realised that he had now alienated both Akbar, who was angered
by Badi‘ al-Zaman's execution, and Shah ‘Abbas, who would doubtless try to restore

his prestige by mounting a second campaign against Balkh. He therefore decided to
seek support from the khanate's traditional allies, the Ottomans. An ambassador was
sent to Mehmet III with a letter in which Baqi Muhammad recalled the help given by
Sulaiman the Magnificent to Buraq Khan, as well as the Ottomans' good relations
with ‘Abdallah II. As it happened Mehmet III knew that an Iranian attack on his
territories was imminent. It suited him, therefore to respond generously to Baqi
Muhammad's plea for help. He wrote back, announcing that he had instructed the
governor of Shirwan to provide ‘Abd al-Baqi’ (sic) with weapons as required, and
soon afterwards 20 guns and 200 harquebusses were sent to the khanate ‘for use
against the Persians’. The Venetian envoy to the Porte, Bailo, would later claim that
this delivery of weapons, and the ‘agreement for military aid’ which preceded it, were
responsible for the war that broke out in August 1603 between Turkey and Iran. But
Shah ‘Abbas did not attack the khanate again. Baqi Muhammad therefore did not use
the weapons sent by the Ottomans.®
This was partly because of a new diplomatic initiative by Bagi Muhammad which
enabled Shah ‘Abbas to abandon his hostile schemes with regard to the khanate
without losing face, and partly because the Shah had decided instead to try and
recover the provinces ceded to Turkey in 1590. Shortly after returning to Isfahan, he
heard with pleasure that the Bukharan amirs guarding the Khurasan frontier had
written to their Iranian counterparts, suggesting that each side should refrain from
attacking the other and from molesting caravans of traders. Shah ‘Abbas, who needed
a pretext for not intervening again in the kanate, and who was keen that Khurasan
should recover the agricultural and commercial prosperity which it had enjoyed under
the Timurids, was only too pleased to take up this suggestion. He therefore instructed
his amirs not to molest traders or pilgrims. He also gave orders for peace to be

maintained on the frontier.§”
64 Abi ’1-Fadl, Akbarnama, III, 813-4, 817. Bhagchand, 205b-6a. Mahmiid b. Wali (Ethé), 68b-7 La.

Hajji Mir, 167a-b. Iskandar Beg, 631. Ahmad b. Shams, 557b-8a. Muhammad Yasuf Munshi,
245b-6a, says nothing about Badi‘ al-Zaman and insists that Baqi Muhammad marched to Qunduz
before the Shah's campaign in order to punish the Qarai (Qarrah) tribe for allegedly killing his
brother Din Muhammad.

65 Muhammad Badi‘, D 710, 248b-9a, provides an interesting, but unconfirmed footnote to the

recapture of Badakhshan. He says that in 1011 (between 21 June 1602 and 10 June
Muhammad marched on Qunduz, took the town and killed Badi‘ al-Zaman, after which
one of Shahrukh's sons, Mirza Muhammad Zaman, who was living there as a prisoner
Zaman's. The following year, however, the new governor of Qunduz was murdered.
66 Hammer, Geschichte, Il, 723. Faridin Beg, II, 165-6. Steensgaard, "The Asian trade

323.

67 Iskandar Beg, 632.

118

1603) Baqi
he installed
of Badi‘ alrevolution"

1598-1605

Shah “Abbas was now free to turn his attention to the Ottomans. Feeling at last
strong enough to tackle the Turkish army he decided to punish the Sultan for the
military help which he had given to Baqi Muhammad. In any case he had been
expecting a retaliatory attack from Mehmet III in response to the razing to the ground
that spring of the fort of Nehawand, an unpopular Turkish enclave on Iranian

territory.°8 He therefore left for Tabriz in September 1603, hoping to forestall the
Ottoman attack and also to make a bid for his ancestors’ homeland of Azerbaijan. He
entered Tabriz without difficulty, and later defended it successfully against the
Ottoman army. He went on to retake the remainder of Azerbaijan, then he marched

into Armenia where he besieged the town of Eriwan (Yerevan). Although Eriwan fell
to him as early as June 1604, he continued to campaign against the Ottomans and

remained in the area for several years.69
Meanwhile Akbar had taken action to avenge the execution of his protégé Badi‘ alZaman by Baqi Muhammad. He chose to retaliate against a certain Payanda
Sultan/Khan who had been living in Qandahar ever since the defeat of Pul-i Salar in
1598 and who is said by Mughal historians to have been a brother of Baqi
Muhammad's. Some time after the news of Badi‘ al-Zaman's death reached the
Emperor, he asked for Payanda Sultan to be brought to Agra. He then entrusted the
Prince to Badi‘ al-Zaman's brother, Mirza Wali, and not surprisingly Mirza Wali had

him put to death.7°
If Payanda Sultan was indeed related to him, Baqi Muhammad would no doubt
have been affected by his death. But Payanda Sultan's name has not been found in the
Bukharan sources consulted, and that may be why Baqi Muhammad chose to ignore
Akbar's vengeful act.7! In any case he does not appear to have anticipated a Mughal
attack on the khanate. The very pettiness of Akbar's reaction to the death of Badi< alZaman seemed to indicate his frustration, for, with his death, he had lost more than a
useful ally, he had also lost a pretext for attacking Ma wara’ al-nahr. Baqi Muhammad
therefore decided that it would be safe for him to leave the khanate and attack
Khurasan.
He wanted to take advantage of the fact that Shah ‘Abbas was fighting in the
west. He was also keen to use the Ottoman troops sent to him in 1602. Whether or
not he gained in fame and territory as a result, his action was sure to strengthen his
links with the Sultan. His peaceful overtures to the Khurasani amirs having gained
him a useful breathing-space, he was now ready to attack. He accelerated his
preparations when he heard that Shah ‘Abbas had left Isfahan in September 1603 and
had already despatched troops to Chahar Juy and Andkhud when two events took
place which forced him to alter his plans: - his father, Jani Muhammad, died, and
Kildi Muhammad attacked the khanate again.’2

68 Savory, Histoire, 826. This happened shortly after Nauriz/March 1603.

69 Thid., 825-6, 828-46 and ff.
70 Aba ’1-Fadl, Akbarnama, II, 803, 817. Lahauri, I, i, 217-8, places Payanda Sultan's death earlier,
in about 1599, and says that he was then in Lahore, in the care of the governor of Punjab Qalij
Khan.

71 Mahmid b. Wali (Ethé), 14a, 72a, does not mention this Prince among Baqi Muhammad's
brothers, although he does mention three Princes who do not appear to have made a mark on
history, called Alim, Shah Muhammad and Muhammad. It is of course possible that the full name
of the last one was Payanda Muhammad.

72 Wajji Mir, 167b-8a.

119

Birthpangs of a new dynasty

Relations between Baqi Muhammad and his father had probably begun to
deteriorate not long after Bagi Muhammad returned from Badakhshan, coins being
issued in his name in 1011/before June 1603. It was at about this time that Jani
Muhammad went, or was encouraged to go, on pilgrimage with Yar Muhammad
Khan but he died during the journey, in the autumn of 1603. Baqi Muhammad now
had to concern himself with organising his own accession. As a matter of courtesy he
first offered the title of khaqan to his grandfather, Yar Muhammad Khan, who was
still alive, but the old man declined his token offer, saying that he wished ‘to lead the
people in religious matters and to meditate’.73 Bagi Muhammad's accession was thus
uncontested, and his coronation took place in Bukhara on 12 Jumada II 1012/17
November 1603.
Shortly afterwards, the alleged Suyiinchid Prince Kildi Muhammad carried out his
second attack on the khanate. This time there were Qirghiz as well as Qazaqs in his
army, and they threatened Tashkent. Baqi Muhammad, who was then in Samarqand,
hastily gathered an army and recalled the troops sent in the direction of Khurasan.

Then he marched towards Tashkent. A battle took place at the village of Ikriyar,”4 but
the Bukharan army, unprepared for the fierceness of the enemy onslaught, was forced
to give way. Baqi Muhammad had to retreat to Samarqand where another battle took
place, and this time the Bukharans won the day. Kildi Muhammad fled back towards
the steppes of Qipchaq, with the Bukharans in hot pursuit, leaving behind many dead

and much booty.7>
The khanate had been saved, but it was a few months before Baqi Muhammad
was able to go to Khurasan, as he had intended. According to the eighteenth-century
historian, Qipchaq Khan, the expedition did take place, but in May 1604. He claims
that Bagi Muhammad seized the whole province and then stayed about six months in
Nishapur and Mashhad, his achievement so frightening neighbouring Khwarazm that
the khutbah was said there in his name. But whether this campaign took place in May
1604, or at all, and it is not mentioned elsewhere, it cannot have lasted six months,
because Baqi Muhammad was in the khanate in the summer of 1604, and an attempt

was then made on his life. 76
The plotters included his own brother-in-law, ‘Abdi Khwajah, who had turned
against him after receiving what he considered to be an insufficient reward (an annuity
of 150,000 tanga) for getting him recognized in Tirmidh. Because this hardly
compared with the promised reward of one-third of the income of the khanate, ‘Abdi
Khwajah became a focus for the khan's discontented subjects. And apparently there
were many who disliked Baqi Muhammad because of his strict enforcement of the

73 Davidovich, Istoriya, 14. Mahmad b. Wali (Ethé), 71a-2b.
74 Not traced.
75 Mahmid b.Wali (Ethé), 73a-4a. Hajji Mir, 168a-b, says Kildi Muhammad Khan, who was a

Qazaq, seized Tashkent, but later took fright on hearing that Baqi Muhammad's army was on its
way, so he apologised for his attack and left for the steppes. Ahmad b. Shams, 558a-9a, says the
first encounter between the two men took place near Shahrukhiya. He goes on to say that after
leaving Samarqand Kildi Muhammad was killed during a raid on the nearby village of Deh Pidi.
This seems likely to be true because his name is not mentioned again by any historian. Iskandar
Beg, 632, gives a rather different version of this episode. Not only does he appear to place the
rebellion by ‘Kildi Muhammad Jan’ (sic) at about the same time as the Shah's siege of Balkh (i.e.
over a year earlier), he also says that this Qazaq Prince made peace overtures to Baqi Muhammad
from Tashkent and that peace was agreed.
’

76 Qipchaq Khan, 269b. Abi ’1-Fadl, Akbarnama, II, 832.
120

1598-1605

law and because of many administrative and tax measures about which,
unfortunately, no concrete details are available. They plotted to kill Baqi Muhammad
and to replace him with ‘Abdi Khwajah, but the plot miscarried after the assassin lost
his nerve. He then revealed under torture the names of his fellow-plotters, and Baqi
Muhammad had a number of them put to death. In the case of ‘Abdi Khwajah and
another influential khwajah, however, he took a more cautious line. He merely
deprived them both of their possessions and sent them off into exile.
‘Abdi Khwajah sought refuge in India and was warmly welcomed at Court when
he arrived there in September-October 1604. The Emperor was only too pleased to
have a pretext for intervening in the khanate. He listened eagerly, therefore, to tales of
Baqi Muhammad's ‘improper’ behaviour towards the weak and defenceless, as well
as the amirs against whose possessions and honour he was said to have ‘stretched the
hand of tyranny and oppression’. Akbar even tried to organise an expedition against
Ma wara‘ al-nahr in order to free the people from oppression. But his amirs, who
were in Deccan, pointed out that the situation there was serious and that their presence
was needed, so he was forced to abandon his plan. However, he continued to treat
‘Abdi Khwajah with the greatest respect and generosity, and it was apparently the
khwajah who persuaded him to forgive his rebellious son Salim and to name him his

successor.’7
Meanwhile an incident occurred which severely damaged Akbar's relations with
Iran. Some time after March 1604 a contingent of Iranian troops from Herat seized the
fort of Bust and the province of Garmsir, acting apparently on their own initiative.
The Mughals tried to retake the lost territory, but failed in their endeavour, largely
because the governor of Qandahar, Shah Bik, fell ill during the campaign. Akbar was
furious. On the other hand Shah ‘Abbas, who had not authorised the campaign was
not displeased with the result, although in fact he would have preferred his forces to
conquer Qandahar rather than Garmsir. His relations with Akbar suffered
accordingly. And Baqi Muhammad was delighted, for it meant that his neighbours
were unlikely to unite against him in the near future. In any case Shah “Abbas was
still busy in the west, reconquering the towns lost to the Ottomans in 1590. Shah
‘Abbas, in fact, considered this so important for his prestige that when the new
Ottoman monarch, the indecisive and cruel Ahmad I, offered to negotiate a peace
settlement in the autumn of 1604 he refused, for he wanted the full glory of

recovering his patrimony by his own efforts.”
During the remainder of his reign Baqi Muhammad does not appear to have made
any further contact with either the Ottomans or the Tsar, although the news of his
attack on Khurasan in May 1604 may have encouraged the Ottomans to make a bid
for Qarabagh and Hamadan that summer.
In late 1604 Bagi Muhammad was faced with a new attack on the eastern parts of
the khanate.79 This time the attack was led by Kildi Muhammad's son who took

77 Aba ’1-Fadl, Akbarnama, Ill, 832, 834. Nizamutdinov, Iz istorii sredneaziatsko-indiiskikh
otnoshenii", 134-5. See CHI, IV, 145-52, about Salim's first rebellion (1599-1603) and his
subsequent failure to fight the Rana of Udaipur, as ordered, which led to his arrest in November

1604.

78 Iskandar Beg, 672-4. Abii ’I-Fadl, Akbarndma, III, 828, says the Qizilbash helped local rebels to
seize Bust and later attacked Zamindawar. Savory, History, 837, 846, 851, 857, 863.

79 This is not mentioned by Hajji Mir. He says (168b) that the last four years of Baqi Muhammad's

reign were peaceful. Muhammad Yusuf Munshi, 247b, says that when Baqi Muhammad failed to

121

Birthpangs of a new dynasty
Andijan, while his Qazaq allies seized an enormous area on the right bank of the SyrDarya, stretching from Tashkent in the south to Sighnaq in the north. When Baqi
Muhammad heard the news, although he was already suffering from the wasting
disease which was to kill him, he set off at once from Samarqand to deal with the
attack. His energetic response so impressed his enemies that they sent ambassadors to
meet him at Khujand and to offer their submission. Recognising Baqi Muhammad as
sovereign, the Qazaqs and the rebel Prince then promised to pay taxes and to cease
molesting and plundering the inhabitants of the area. Baqi Muhammad graciously
accepted their apologies and promises, granted them his pardon, and returned to
Samargand. The campaign had been a success, but although it was brief and
uneventful, it had further weakened his health. He lost his appetite, dysentery set in,
and, realising that his strength was failing, he summoned his brother, Wali
Muhammad, from Balkh. In the meantime he tried the cure suggested by a Sufi sage,
which was to lie on a boat on the Amu-Darya in order to benefit from the river air.
But he did not recover his health. And he met his end on this very boat in the last

weeks of 1013/May 1605.8°
In the six years since his brother Din Muhammad had died at Pul-i Salar, Baqi
Muhammad had achieved a great deal. Despite efforts by Iran, India and the Qazaqs to
dismember the khanate, he had maintained its integrity and had even regained much of
the territory conquered by ‘Abdallah II. He had re-asserted direct Bukharan control
over Balkh, recovered Badakhshan, reduced the Qazagqs to the status of vassals, and
had secured general support for the new dynasty in the khanate. However, Shah
‘Abbas was still determined to impose a ruler of his choice on Balkh and in the years
that followed the Ashtarkhanids would face more than one pretender supported by
Iran.

recover from his mysterious illness, the Qazaqs and Qaraqalpags rebelled and attacked the khanate.

Abuseitova, "Iz istorii", 172, says the Qaraqalpaqs had taken control of Turkestan and Tashkent

shortly after the death of “Abd al-Mu’min. Then in the spring of 1013/1604 the Qazags under
Bahadur and Ishim came over and killed their leader ‘Abd al-Ghaffar, after which they presumably

took over the area.
80 Mahmid b. Wali (Ethé), 74a-5b. Ahmad b. Shams, 559a, says Bagi Muhammad was 36, but

other historians make him to be much older. Muhammad Yusuf Munshi, 247b-8a, says he fell ill

at 51 and died a year later. Hajji Mir, 168b, says he was 56.

£22

5
Wali Muhammad's

inglorious reign

(1605-1611)

Wali Muhammad was warmly welcomed in Bukhara. His coronation followed
naturally after his brother's death, for there were no problems of seniority to contend
with. However, although Bukhara presented no problem, he felt less sure about
Samargand which was governed by his 15-year-old nephew, Imam Quli, and before
venturing there he thought it best to gather an army. Calling up troops from Balkh and
Badakhshan, he marched with them to Samarqand, and after imposing his authority
on the town he returned to Bukhara to mark his accession with the first of many
banquets.
His merrymaking with ‘moon-faced’ young men and young women was soon
disturbed by news that the Qazags had raided Turkestan and Tashkent, and that two
Abulkhairid Princes, who had rebelled against his brother in 1600, had rebelled

again. Wali Muhammad marched to deal with the Qazaqs, sending one army under
Imam Quli to Hisar to fight ‘Ubaidallah Sultan, and another to Jaghaniyan against
“Abdallah Sultan. After these expeditions were crowned with success, and the rebel

Princes were executed, Wali Muhammad returned to his revelry, but not for long, for
soon the khanate was again under attack.! In autumn 1605 hostile plans to this effect
were being hatched in India and Iran, and at about the same time Badakhshan rebelled
under a new pretender.
In Mughal India Akbar had died and Salim had come to the throne on 21 October
1605. The new Emperor was anxious to justify the name of Jahangir, or Conqueror
of the World, which he had chosen for himself, and, like his father, he wished to

regain control of Ma wara‘ al-nahr. Shortly after his accession, he decided that the
time was ideal for an attack on the khanate, because Wali Muhammad's ‘affairs were
not yet in order’. However, he soon realised that his own house was not in order. He
had to send his second son Parwiz to fight the Rana of Udaipur, and before this task
had been completed Parwiz had to leave for Qandahar in order to fight off an Iranian
attack. These difficulties, and also the rebellion by Jahangir's eldest son Khusrau,
saved the khanate, but the Emperor continued to follow events there, and especially in
Badakhshan, with unfriendly interest.”
Meanwhile, the Bukharan refugees who were in Iran had decided to take
advantage of the change of monarch to make a bid for the khanate. In September 1605
their spokesman, Yar Muhammad Bi,’ went to see Shah ‘Abbas at Nakhjuwan
1 Mahmid b. Wali (Ethé), 76b-78b, 80b. Akhmedov, Istoriya, 101, says that “Abdallah Sultan was
the son of Muhammad Salim, but Pir Muhammad's son, who was only a small child in 1599,
could not possibly have had a grown son by 1605.

2 Aba ’l-Muzaffar, 11, 33, 22.

3 Iskandar Beg, 706, calls him Mirza, which would suggest that he was a Prince, but this appears to

Wali

Muhammad

(Nakhichevan) and explained that the time was ripe for attacking the khanate because
Wali Muhammad was not as yet properly established on the throne.
Shah ‘Abbas, who was fully engaged in reconquering Azerbaijan and Shirwan
from the Ottomans, showed little interest in the idea at first, but he changed his mind
after Yar Muhammad Bi outlined his plan. It was agreed that the refugees would first
take control of Gharjistan, an area north-east of Herat which had been partly
conquered by Iran in 1598 and which stretched roughly from the Murghab river to
Kahmard. Then they would march on Balkh. Shah ‘Abbas accordingly sent orders to
the amirs of Khurasan and Gharjistan to help the ‘Uzbeg Princes’ and their
supporters, and they left Qazwin for Khurasan around November-December 1605.
When they arrived in Herat they were given weapons and a detachment of Iranian
troops. Early in the spring of 1606 they made their way towards Gharjistan where the
forts held by the Iranian amirs were handed over to them, as agreed. Soon the local
tribes began to rally round. They must have been impressed by the Princes’
determination and by their army, and even more so by the fact that they had the
backing of Shah ‘Abbas, who had recently won a major victory against the Ottomans

at Sufiyan.4
Meanwhile there had been further trouble in the khanate. Shortly after the Hisar

rebellion had been overcome another broke out in Badakhshan, under the leadership
of the latest of Shahrukh's supposed sons, a certain Mirza Hasan or Mirza Husain.
When Wali Muhammad was told that the rebels were besieging his son Rustam at
Qunduz, he sent his nephew Imam Quli to relieve the town and on hearing of the
young man's approach the rebels at once abandoned the siege. They fled southwards
towards Ghuri, Imam Quli gave chase, and after a major battle he defeated them near
the village of Tang Marj. The rebels then scattered, leaving many prisoners behind,
much to the delight of Imam Quli and his amirs.
The young man's popularity and renown grew enormously as a result of this
success, which did not please his uncle. He decided therefore to curtail the campaign
and he ordered Imam Quli and his army to return to Qunduz, thereby depriving them”
of the opportunity of pursuing the enemy, taking more booty and increasing their
fame. In their disappointment the amirs turned against Wali Muhammad. They were
soon joined by others who were displeased by the khan's self-indulgent style of life
and by his neglect of administrative matters. They plotted together, having decided to
remove him from the throne and to replace him with his nephew. Imam Quli
apparently knew nothing about this, but when the plot was discovered he fell from
favour and was stripped of his position as head of the army. Wali Muhammad then

took over the government of Samarqand and sought by every means to humiliate his
nephew.
This was particularly obvious when the Qazaqs attacked the khanate under the
leadership of Tawakkul's brother, Ishim, shortly after the plot had been discovered.
Despite Imam Quli's recent successes he was not asked to intervene. Instead the
Qalmaq amir, Muhammad Baqi Bi,° was sent against the Qazags whom he put to

be wrong. Not only does Mahmid b. Wali (Ethé,178b) call him Bi, but the term Mirza (Prince),
used by the Iranian historian, was not indigenous to the khanate. In any case, if he had been of
royal blood, Shah “Abbas would have probably chosen to sponsor him instead, for he would have
been an ideal candidate for the Bukharan throne.

4 Iskandar Beg, 706-7. Savory, History, 888.
5 It is not clear whether this was the amir who was allegedly responsible for ‘Abdallah's death.

124

1605-11

flight after a fierce battle near Tashkent. Ishim Sultan left behind his wife, children
and possessions, and the area was repossessed. Wali Muhammad then appointed his
cousin Payanda Muhammad as governor, and an effort was made to restore the
region's agriculture, for it had suffered greatly under Qazaq domination.®
Wali Muhammad's efforts on behalf of the agricultural community may have
added to his popularity in the east, but in the rest of the khanate he became
increasingly unpopular. His shabby treatment of Imam Quli was much resented, and
he soon lost the support of a large number of amirs and nobles, not only because
many were dismissed from their posts, but because those whom he named his
advisers and whom he showered with gifts were considered unsuitable. Furthermore
he allowed corruption to develop, and gave vast sums of money indiscriminately to
the poor. The discontented began to rally round Imam Quli until, waking up to the
dangers of the situation, Wali Muhammad decided to pardon his nephew. He named
the young man governor of Samarqand and appointed his 14-year-old brother, Nadir
Muhammad, governor of Kish (Shar-i sabz ).7
It was just as well that internal peace had been preserved, for Wali Muhammad
would be having to rely on all the support that he could get in order to preserve the
integrity of the khanate. Between autumn 1606 and summer 1607 the khanate was
attacked from three different directions: in the east the Qazaq Abiuli Sultan took
Tashkent and marched on Samarqand, in the south-east Mirza Hasan made another
effort to take Badakhshan, and in the south, as planned at Nakhjuwan, the Shah's
protégés attacked the province of Balkh. The chronology of the various events is not
clear, but it seems that the Qazaq attack came first and was dealt with by the khan
himself. Wali Muhammad defeated their army at Samarqand, causing Abiuli Sultan to
give up Tashkent and to flee to the Qipchaq steppes. But according to Mahmid
b.Wali the khan's success only increased his pride, arrogance and tyrannical ways. In
celebration of his recent victory he helped himself liberally to his subjects’ wives and
possessions, hardly the best way to ensure their support.8
In early 1607 a large number of troops were ordered to converge on Badakhshan
from the south and the north to deal with Mirza Hasan's revolt. Nadir Muhammad
took part in this campaign, together with three capable ataliq: Razzak Pirdi, ‘Abd alRahman Ushin, who had served under Din Muhammad, and Baqi Bi Ushin. The
campaign was hard fought and the rebellion was only crushed after four major battles.
Mirza Hasan was captured and executed. Nadir Muhammad went to see his uncle in
Samargand and was ‘very kindly treated’ but, as with Imam Quli nearly two years
earlier, the khan did not think it necessary to reward him for his services, and the
young man returned to Kish empty-handed.?
The third attack on the khanate began in the spring of 1607 when the pretenders,
who

had gathered together an army

of between

10,000 and

13,000 men, left

Gharjistan for the province of Balkh. The Hazarjat tribe and the amirs in charge of
Shiburghan, Maimana and Jijektu, appealed to the then governor of Balkh, Shah Bik
Kikeltash, for help. He wrote to the khan for instructions and strengthened the

defences of Balkh, but made no effort to halt the enemy's advance. As a result the
enemy was able to march along the river Murghab as far as Maruchag before the relief

6 Mahmid b. Wali (Ethé), 78b-8 1b.
7 Tbid., 81b, 80a.

8 Thid., 82a-83b.
9 Thid., 170b-3b. Aba ’1-Muzaffar, 60, attributes the death of Mirza Hasan not to Nadir Muhammad,
but to Imam Quli.

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Wali Muhammad

army sent by Wali Muhammad under Hajji Bi Qushchi arrived. Ten days went by
before Hajji Bi was ready to attack, during which time several officials defected to the
pretenders and others fled in fear of their army. When the khan's nephews heard
about this, they decided to intervene without waiting for special permission from the
khan. They marched to the area, joined the relief army and took part in the battle
which ended with the defeat of the pretenders' army.
The pretenders then fled back to Gharjistan with much depleted forces, but after
gathering more supporters there, they returned to the attack. This time Wali
Muhammad sent Nadir Muhammad to fight them, naming him governor of Balkh
under the tutelage of two of the victorious amirs, Hajji Bi Qushchi and Mansur Hajji,
who became respectively the young man's ataliq and parwanchi. The khan totally
ignored Imam Quli's contribution to the last campaign, probably because he had not
fully forgiven the young man, and because he hoped to sow discord between the
brothers by his obvious show of favouritism.
Nadir Muhammad was delighted with his appointment. He at once marched
towards Maimana but failed to make contact with the enemy, so he returned to Balkh

where he made arrangements for the defence of the town in case the pretenders should
attack in his absence. After doing so he marched to Shiburghan, but once again he
failed to encounter the enemy, so he appointed several officials in this town and
returned to Balkh.
In the meantime Wali Muhammad changed his mind. Reluctant to let his nephew
enjoy the glory of a successful encounter with the pretenders, he decided to fight them
himself. He sent the Qalmaq amir Muhammad Baqi Bi towards Balkh with an army
and followed him at a leisurely pace. By the time Muhammad Baqi Bi had crossed the
Amu-Darya the situation had become very serious. A small group of amirs from
Balkh had been defeated by Jahangir Sultan and Muhammad Salim Sultan at Saripul.
Local people had rallied to the pretenders at Shiburghan, greatly increasing their
numbers, and they were only eight leagues from Balkh, at Aqcha. Nevertheless
Muhammad Baqi Bi was undaunted. He marched to Aqcha, engaged them in battle
and defeated the pretenders. Their defeat soon turned into a rout when it was heard
that the man who had planned the campaign, Yar Muhammad Bi, had been captured
and put to death. Their army scattered in all directions. Muhammad Salim disappeared
without trace, and Jahangir Sultan returned to Saripul with a small number of
supporters. He was thoroughly demoralised, but a few days later, while he was still
trying to decide on a suitable course of action, he was told that Nadir Muhammad had
left Balkh for Tirmidh to meet Wali Muhammad. This seemed an ideal opportunity for
him to recoup his losses. Urged by his supporters to take advantage of the Prince's
absence, he managed to enter Balkh at night without undue difficulty, but his success
was short-lived. News of his arrival soon spread to the defenders of the town and the
very same night he was captured and put to death.10
Delighted to hear that the danger from the pretenders was over, Wali Muhammad
decided to punish the Shah for having supported them. In autumn 1607 he sent two
contingents into Khurasan. The first, which consisted of over 3,000 men, was
ordered to ravage Marw, the second was sent further south against Badghis. The
campaign was successful at first, but an unexpected change in the weather and severe
snowfalls caused the men much hardship and compelled them to withdraw towards
10 Thid. 173b-81a. Ahmad b. Shams, 559b-60a, says Nadir Muhammad himself gave orders to have
him put to death. Neither Iskandar Beg (743-4) nor Hajji Mir (169b-70a) mention Jahangir
Sultan's ultimate fate.

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the khanate. At this stage the governor of Khurasan attacked them and they fought
with praiseworthy courage and endurance, but were eventually defeated. If we are to
believe Iskandar Beg, they fled back to the khanate, leaving behind as many as 300
dead and 80 prisoners, the most prominent of whom were apparently sent to the Shah

who had them put to death in February 1608.1!

Meanwhile, during his stay in Balkh Wali Muhammad had realised with concern
that the people of the town strongly supported his nephew. He decided to curtail
Nadir Muhammad's growing power and did so by appointing a new ataliq for him
who robbed the young man of any vestige of authority and took the entire income of
the province into his own hands. The new ataliq, Shah Bik Kikeltash, had recently
governed Balkh and he was a harsh man who believed in ruling by terror. He became
universally hated because of his exactions and the cruel punishments which he
devised when dealing with offenders. Not surprisingly, therefore, when the people
rose against him in 1608 Nadir Muhammad did nothing to defend him. The ataliq
sought refuge in the medresseh ‘Abdallah Khan, but the building was stormed and he
was put to death by the same savage means that he had so often used against others.!2
Wali Muhammad was incensed when he heard the news. He at once gathered an
army and prepared to march against Balkh to discipline his nephew, but it was some
months before he in fact arrived there. Although eager to set off, he was reluctant to

leave his capital exposed to a retaliatory raid by Imam Quli, who might well attack in
support of his brother. He had also heard of a Qazaq and Qalmag raid on Sighnaq
and, unaware that Imam Quli had invited the nomads over, he wanted to secure his
nephew's help against them.!3 Before leaving for Balkh he therefore offered the
young man a full pardon for his past misdemeanours, asking in return for a promise
of obedience and support. When Imam Quli agreed to this Wali Muhammad went to
join the troops which he had sent on ahead to Qarshi. But Imam Quli's agreement had
only been a short-term measure. As soon as his uncle left Bukhara the young man
rebelled, putting his own ataliq to death.14 Wali Muhammad therefore had to turn
back and make for Samargand. Imam Quli held out for a few days, trying to negotiate
a free pardon, and when his uncle refused to forgive him, he left for Balkh.
Wali Muhammad was thus left with the task of fighting the combined Qazaq and
Qalmaq army. While he was engaged in doing so, his nephews did their best to defy
his authority and to anger him still further. Imam Quli made a bid for Badakhshan,
taking Qunduz, Taliqan and Ghuri. Nadir Muhammad welcomed to Balkh the capable
amir, Razzak Pirdi, who had been convicted of embezzlement during his recent tenure
of office as governor of Kulab. By the time Wali Muhammad had defeated the Qazaqs
and their allies, and marched towards Balkh, his nephews were ready to fight. They
sent Razzak Pirdi towards the Amu-Darya, and he dug himself in facing the khan's
11 Iskandar Beg, 745-6. Hajji Mir, 170b, says nothing about their flight or about prisoners being
taken. According to him the Bukharans, in fact, very nearly won the battle, but the weather

changed and the sudden cold made fighting impossible. Although forced to leave the area, they
still managed to take back all their booty.
12 Akhmedoy, Istoriya, 103, places the ataliq's death in the autumn of 1608. Mahmud b.Wali
(Ethé), 84a, 182b. Hajji Mir, 172a. Muhammad Yisuf Munshi, 248a-b. Ahmad b. Shams, 560b.

13 See Ahmad b.Shams, 561a, for Imam Quli inviting the Qazaqs to attack.
14 Ahmad b.Shams, 560b, says Imam Quli's ataliq was appointed at the same time at that of Nadir

Muhammad. His name was Nazar Kukeltash and he was Shah Bik Kukeltash's brother. Mahmud
b. Wali, 84b, says that Imam Quli's ataliq was appointed after Nadir Muhammad's ataliq had been
killed. Hajji Mir (172a), Iskandar Beg (832), and Qipchaq Khan (270a), all say that Imam Quli
took the initiative and was the first to kill his ataliq.

127]

Wali Muhammad

army. Twenty days later Wali Muhammad decided to negotiate a peace agreement,
having realised that his nephews and their supporters would not be intimidated and
that a long siege would be necessary if he wanted to reduce them to obedience. The
exact terms of the agreement are not known, but it seems that the khan forgave his
nephews on condition that they forfeit all rights to Badakhshan and Samargand. No
actual fighting had taken place during this period of confrontation, and Wali
Muhammad returned to Bukhara while the Princes remained together in Balkh.!5
The young men were delighted with their achievement. However, they soon
realised that theirs was a hollow victory, for they had lost Samarqand and they now
had to share the income of the province of Balkh. In the early months of 1609 they
appear to have written to their uncle about the matter. They asked for their appanages
to be re-organised and suggested that Balkh be given to Imam Quli, and Hisar,
Qunduz and Baglan to his brother. But Wali Muhammad had recovered his former
self-assurance since his return to Bukhara. He had also replenished his Treasury by
helping himself to the possessions of his subjects,!® and he not only refused their
suggestion point blank, he even demanded that they return Balkh to him. As might be
expected, the Princes took up arms. They marched on Jaghaniyan and Hisar, and
seized both towns. The khan also marched. ‘Acting upon the advice of his son,
Rustam, who had lost Hisar to his cousins, he tried to seize Tirmidh in their rear in
order to cut their communications with Balkh, but the Princes managed to forestall
him. Hurrying back to Tirmidh, they inflicted a serious defeat on their uncle's army.
Wali Muhammad was again compelled to sue for peace and to withdraw to Bukhara.

This time the conflict had lasted three months.!7
The situation, however, had seriously deteriorated. The khan therefore decided on
a twofold plan of action in order to cow his nephews into submission. He would
gradually eliminate their sympathisers, and he would try and secure Shah ‘Abbas's
support against them. In the spring of 1610 he began to implement his plan by
sending messengers to Khurasan who explained to the Iranian governors that he
wanted to establish friendly relations with the Shah. Shah ‘Abbas, who was still busy
fighting for Georgia and for the lands earlier surrendered to the Ottomans in the west,
was only too pleased to accept the idea of peace on his eastern frontiers, as he no
longer had any excuse for interfering in Balkh. He sent ambassador Mirza ‘Ali Bik
Turkmen to Bukhara, and when his ambassador returned, accompanied by an envoy
from Wali Muhammad, he made sure that the Bukharan was lavishly entertained.!8
The establishment of good relations with Iran did not please the people of the
khanate. On the contrary. Wali Muhammad became extremely unpopular as a result of
his rapprochement with the hated heretic (Shi‘a) ruler, for his subjects did not forget
that Shah “Abbas had threatened the integrity of the khanate and supported many
pretenders in the years between 1599 and 1607. Wali Muhammad's amirs began to
write to Imam Quli urging him to march on the capital and to depose his uncle, but
unfortunately their letters fell into the khan's hands. He was furious and reacted
15 Ahmad b. Shams, 561a-2b. Mahmid b. Wali (Ethé), 182b-3a, 84b-5b, says the khan did not fight
the Qazagqs himself. He sent Yalangtash Bi and Muhammad Baqi Bi to fight Abuli Sultan, who
was threatening Samarqand, but the Qazaq Prince had left for Sighnaq before they arrived, so they
returned to Samarqand. Iskandar Beg, 832. Muhammad Yusuf Munshi, 248a-9a.
16 ian b. Wali (Ethé), 85b-6a, says he also took their wives and showed total contempt for the
rule of law.
17 Ahmad b. Shams, 562b. Iskandar Beg, 832. Mahmid b. Wali (Ethé), 86a-8a.

18 Iskandar Beg, 815-6. Hajji Mir, 171a.

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1605-11

swiftly in order to nip the rebellion in the bud. He summoned the most highly-placed
conspirators to an alleged council meeting and when they arrived, in Ramadan 1019/
November 1610, he had them summarily put to death.
The fact that the men executed included a diwanbegi and Hajji Bi Qushchi, who
had successfully defended the khanate in 1607 against the Iranian-backed pretenders,

terrified all the other amirs. But instead of forcing them into abject obedience, as the
khan had hoped, the executions only drove them into his nephews' camp. Thus the
Qalmaq amir Muhammad Baqi Bi took their side, as did Yalangtish Bi and the
influential Khwajah Hashim of Deh Pidi. They all fled to Balkh and shortly after their

arrival Imam Quli and his brother set off with them to fight their uncle.!9 In late
1019/February-March 1611 the opposing armies met at Qatlish near Qarshi,2° and

there the issue was finally resolved by chance, and not by force of arms. The khan,
who only had 3,000 men to oppose to his nephews' 7,000, decided to negotiate with
them. He even agreed to forgive them if they handed over their evil counsellors, but
that night wild animals, variously described as boars or wolves, broke into his camp
and attacked his horses. Mistaking the stampede that followed for the sound of an
enemy army galloping into his camp, Wali Muhammad fled in terror, and his
supporters were left with little option but to surrender to his nephews.?!
Wali Muhammad then made for Bukhara, but he was not allowed to enter the
town. Taking his wife, Ay Khanum, and his children with him, he left for Chahar
Juy where he remained a few days, hoping to regroup his forces. Only four to five
hundred men, however, had rallied round him, when he was told on 1 Muharram

1020/26 March 1611 that Nadir Muhammad was coming to besiege the town. Taking
the men with him and also his son Rustam Muhammad whom he sent to Herat, he
fled at once to Iran, hoping to go to Mecca on pilgrimage and later perhaps to regain
his kingdom with help from the Shah. His remaining children and his wife were left

behind, and they were all taken prisoner when Chahar Jay fell shortly afterwards.22
Wali Muhammad and his party travelled via Marw, Mashhad, Bistam, Semnan,
Khwar and Kashan, and reached Isfahan two and a half months later, in mid-June.

They were warmly received by the governors of the various towns on the way. Many
of them came out to welcome Wali Muhammad with gifts, and they all made sure that
he was comfortable during his stay. While in Mashhad he took the opportunity of
visiting the shrine of Imam Rida, a visit which would no doubt have pleased his Shi‘a
host. Shah ‘Abbas, to whom Wali Muhammad had written from Marw, responded
generously to his letter, sending officials to Bistam and Khar with greetings and with
enough rich gifts to enable the khan to travel in style. Iraqi horses bedecked with
gold, as well as mules and camels, were provided for his transport, together with
tents, carpets, dishes, travelling bottles and bejewelled candlesticks for his comfort. A
profusion of hides, materials, fur coats, damask and gold robes were delivered for his
use and that of his suite, and in case this was not sufficient for his needs, his

19 Mahmiid b. Wali (Ethé), 88b. Hajji Mir, 171b. Iskandar Beg, 833. Lahauri, I, i, 218.

20 Not traced.
21 Iskandar Beg, 834. Hajji Mir, 172b-3a. Qipchag Khan 270b. Muhammad Yisuf Munshi, 249a,

says nothing about the attempted campaign and negotiation. According to him Wali Muhammad
was hunting at Qarshi when he found out about the amirs' plot, whereupon he at once fled to Iran
with his two sons. Mahmid b. Wali (Ethé), 89a. Akhmedoy, Istoriya, 104, does not mention the

stampede which frightened the khan.
22 Mahmid b. Wali (Ethé), 89b-90a, 183b. Ahmad b. Shams, 563a. Jalal al-Din Muhammad, Add.
272Al, 346b-7b. Hajji Mir, 173a-b. Iskandar Beg, 834-5. Lahauri, I, i, 219.

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Wali Muhammad

thoughtful host also sent him money and jewels.
10 to 14 miles outside Isfahan, the Shah himself came

Some

;
to meet him,

accompanied by major officials and amirs. After greeting the khan Shah ‘Abbas rode
alongside him into the capital on a road covered with rich materials and lined with a
guard of honour of between 20,000 and 60,000 musketeers. No effort was spared to
make him feel welcome. One of the monarch's own houses was allotted to him. Shah
‘Abbas either visited him, or invited him daily to banquets, private dinners, hunting
expeditions or feasts. Wali Muhammad is said to have been particularly impressed by
the celebrations in honour of the Festival of the Sprinkling of the Waters on 21 June.
He greatly enjoyed the firework displays, the illuminations, the archery competitions

and riding tournaments. 23
Shah ‘Abbas and the khan also found time to discuss his plight and he was
promised help with regaining his throne, on condition that the campaign was
postponed to the following year. By then, the Shah explained, Azerbaijan would be
fully conquered. He himself would be able to lead an army into Khurasan. He would
then be in a position to follow the khan's progress and to intervene on his behalf, if
necessary. Wali Muhammad did not agree with this plan. Although he had considered
giving up his throne and settling in Hijaz if the Shah refused to help him, he was now
anxious to go back to the khanate as soon as possible.
According to Hajji Mir and Lahauri this was because he had heard that Imam Quli
had managed to marry the beautiful Ay Khanum, after having his uncle proclaimed a
heretic and his marriage to her consequently declared null and void. Ay Khanum, a
niece of ‘Abdallah II's, who had so far been married to ‘Abd al-Mu’min, Pir
Muhammad II, Bagi Muhammad, and also to the Qazaq Ishim Sultan, was one of his
most-prized ‘possessions’, and Wali Muhammad was loath to lose her. But, although
jealousy and anger at his nephew's behaviour may well have influenced his decision,
the khan was not suffering from a broken heart. In fact he had found a new object for
his affections among Shah ‘Abbas's slave girls.24 His main reason for wanting to
hurry back to the khanate was that he had received numerous offers of support from
his former subjects. He felt that he had a good chance of regaining his throne,
provided that he acted quickly, and preferably before Imam Quli was firmly
established on the throne. In any case the Shah's offer of help, although welcome in
principle, might do him more harm than good. Shah ‘Abbas's presence in Khurasan
with a large army would probably be misinterpreted. It might even send Wali
Muhammad's supporters into his nephews' arms.
The khan therefore refused the Shah's offer. He insisted that he must return to the
khanate as soon as possible and that the support of a small force from Khurasan
would be sufficient for his needs. He also asked for troops to be given to his son who
was awaiting instructions in Herat. Rustam Muhammad would then be able to attack
the khanate from Gharjistan, in the south, while his father struck at the heart of the
khanate. Shah ‘Abbas was reluctant to lend his support to this plan, but Wali
Muhammad insisted and finally secured his agreement. In July 1611, about a month
after arriving in Isfahan, Wali Muhammad accordingly set off for the khanate. Shah
‘Abbas, who had left for Azerbaijan a few days earlier, had provided him with
horses, camels, mules, tents, weapons and money for the way. He gave orders for
23 Hajji Mir, 173b-8a. Iskandar Beg, 835-8. Jalal al-Din Muhammad, Or 3549, 250b-6b. Mirza Beg,

350a-la. Ahmad b. Shams, 563a. Shah Husain, 496. Mahmid b. Wali (Ethé), 96a-b.

24 Hailbye 178a-b. Lahauri, I, i, 220. Falsafi, IV, 138-9; III, 1452 in the 1983 edition. Iskandar
eg,

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1605-11

the khan to be well looked after until his departure and, according to Iskandar Beg, he
even tried to ensure Wali Muhammad's future success by making the khan's
followers promise to remain loyal to their master, and by advising the khan himself to

show tact and restraint with his former subjects.25
When Wali Muhammad reached Mashhad he hesitated: should he march on Balkh
with his son, or should he make a bid for Bukhara? At this stage he was joined by
many of his supporters from the khanate, who informed him that Bukhara and Balkh
were then unprotected, for Imam Quli and his brother had only just returned from a
campaign to Tashkent, and they had left the bulk of the army in Samarqand in case
another campaign to the eastern regions became necessary. This was an ideal time for
attacking the khanate. Wali Muhammad therefore instructed his son to attack Balkh as
planned, and marched to Chahar Jury, sending ahead a number of his followers to take

the town. Feeling confident of success he took no more than 400 Iranian troops with
him, and if we are to credit Iskandar Beg, he only gave them a minor réle in the

action, using them as reserve troops. On the night of 15 Jumada II/25 August 1611
his troops successfully stormed Chahar Jay. The way to Bukhara was now open and
the following day Wali Muhammad took possession of the capital unopposed.26
Imam Quli had had little chance to enjoy his new réle as khagan. Although his
accession had been uncontested, for even the governor of Tashkent had written to
offer his submission, he had problems with the Qazaqs. They began by causing
disturbances and went on to besiege Tashkent in the spring of 1611. Imam Quli
enlisted the help of Nadir Muhammad, the Hazarjat and other Afghan tribes, and
marched to relieve the town. However, the situation had returned to normal before he
got there. While he was camping at Jizaq, half-way to the Syr-Darya, some of his
amirs, who went ahead on their own initiative, surprised the Qazaqs in the middle of
the night and chased them from Shahrukhiya, Urta Sarai,27 and even from the citadel
of Tashkent. They were subsequently persuaded by their leaders, Ishim Sultan, Abili
Sultan and Tursun Sultan, to return and fight, but when they were told that Imam Quli
had reached the Syr-Darya, they all fled towards Turkestan and sued for peace.
Imam Quli decided to respond generously to their appeal, for he was uneasy at the
thought that his uncle might soon return to the khanate with Iranian support. He
therefore appointed Tursiin Sultan's son, Shah Sa‘id, governor of Turkestan and
Tashkent. This appointment, which probably took them by surprise, was a carefully
thought out move to secure for himself the Qazaqs' goodwill in the future. But
although he was generous in his response Imam Quli took no chances. The young
man would rule under the supervision of the capable and influential Yalangtush Bi

Alchin who was appointed his ataliq. He would thus be unable to endanger the peace

25 Hajji Mir, 178b-80a. Mahmid b.Wali (Ethé), 96b. Iskandar Beg, 839-40. Lahauri, I, i, 220. Jalal
al-Din Muhammad, Or 3549, 256b-7a. Mirza Beg, 351b. Shah Husain, 497.

26 Jalal al-Din Muhammad, Or 3549, 257b-8b, says Wali Muhammad had 1,500 ‘Uzbeg’ troops plus
400 Qizilbash soldiers, of whom 100 were gunners. Mirza Beg, 351a-b, gives Wali Muhammad's
Qizilbash troops as 400 men, and adds that half of them were dismissed after the khan reached
Bukhara, leaving him only with 200 gunners. Hajji Mir, 180a-b, only says that the khan was
given a detachment of Iranian troops. According to Iskandar Beg (841-2), Mehrab Khan had to
insist to make the khan accept an escort of 500 troops. Mahmid b. Wali (Ethé), 97a-b, gives no
figures for the Iranian gunners given to the khan. Muhammad Yusuf Munshi, 249a, says Wali
Muhammad was given 80,000 Iranian troops, but his evidence cannot be relied upon, for he is
much given to exaggeration and he was particularly keen to blacken the character of a khan who
accepted Iranian help against his own country. Ahmad b.Shams, 563b.

27 Not found.
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Wali Muhammad

of the khanate.28

Imam Quli and his brother then returned to their respective seats. At this stage it
would appear that Nadir Muhammad attempted to establish diplomatic relations with
the Mughal Emperor Jahangir. In a letter which he entrusted to Knwajah Khan he sent
belated congratulations on the Emperor's accession and explained that he had been
unable to write earlier because-of the ‘question of Tashkent’. He also expressed the

hope that ambassadors would come over from India in the future.”

Meanwhile, shortly after his return to Samarqand, Imam Quli went to Bukhara to
see his ailing mother and his new wife. He was still there when he was told that Wali
Muhammad was marching towards Bukhara. He sent a certain Mirza Jaqq Haqq to
investigate, but Mirza Jaqq Haqq did not return, for he had defected to Wali
Muhammad at Qarakil. Imam Quli realised that the situation was very serious. There
was very little he could do. He could neither defend Bukhara with a handful of
soldiers, nor play for time until reinforcements reached him, for his uncle had
probably been informed of the situation by the defector. He therefore decided to take
his mother and his wife with him, and fled the capital in the direction of Qarshi and
Balkh.3°
Luckily for him Wali Muhammad made no attempt to set off in pursuit. He was
more interested in having himself proclaimed again as ruler of the khanate and in
taking revenge on his nephew's supporters. This would prove to be a serious
mistake. He had been warmly welcomed in Bukhara when the people realised that
they were unable to fight him off. Even one of the Juibari shaikhs, “Abd al-Rahim,
appears to have rallied to him, but Wali Muhammad's vengeful policy soon lost him
support. According to Hajji Mir he began by having the qadi responsible for marrying
Imam Quli to Ay Khanum put to death.3! Then he summoned the various officials
who had sided with his nephew, threw them into prison and imposed heavy fines on
them. Determined to eliminate all possible traitors, he made liberal use of torture to
extract confessions, and the number of executions began to increase day by day.
When it became clear to the amirs and nobles that they were all at risk, even his
original supporters became disaffected.
Wali Muhammad was quite unaware of the true situation. On the contrary, the
ease with which he had taken the capital persuaded him that he would meet with little
resistance in the rest of the khanate. He therefore dismissed half his Iranian troops
before preparing to deal with Imam Quli and he wrote to inform the Shah that he was
firmly in control of the khanate. Shortly afterwards
he heard that his nephew was in
Qarshi and set off in pursuit. He had not gone far, however, when his advisers

suggested that he had a better chance of taking Samarqand in his nephew's absence,
so without trying to verify the facts he changed direction and made for Samargand.
Unfortunately the information he had been given was already out of date. Realising
that they could only rally the people and defend Samarqand if Imam Quli was in their
midst, a number of amirs, including Yalangtish Bi, had gone to see the young man
28 Mahmid b. Wali (Ethé), 93a-95a. Hajji Mir, 183b-4a.
29 Anon. Maktibat, Ethé 2068, 45b-46a. This letter is unfortunately undated, so that it might just
as well have been sent in 1613.

30 Mahmad b. Wali (Ethé), 95b-6a, 97a-b. Iskandar Beg, 841. Lahauri, I, i, 221, says Imam Quli

left Ay Khanum behind in Qarshi, but this seems unlikely in view of the circumstances of their
marriage. Jalal al-Din Muhammad (258b) and Hajji Mir (180b) both say that Imam Quli was
hunting near Hisar when his uncle arrived and took Bukhara.
31 Yajji Mir, 180b. Iskandar Beg, 842, Says that in fact the qadi was saved by the pleas of the
sayyids and ‘ulama’.

13Z

1605-11

and had persuaded him to go back to Samarqand with them. Then they prepared for
battle. Meanwhile Wali Muhammad marched slowly towards Samarqand, hoping by
the very slowness of his march to persuade the Samarqand amirs that he harboured no
grudge against them, and confident that they would then rally to him. The only result,
however, was to give his nephew time to prepare his defence. By the time Wali
Muhammad and his army of 17,000 arrived at Samarqand on 13 September 1611,
Nadir Muhammad had joined his brother and they were strongly entrenched outside
the town, with troops estimated as 10,000 strong.
Although he had the advantage of numbers, Wali Muhammad did not attack.
Perhaps he feared that his soldiers, tired by the march, would not cover themselves

with glory. Rather than take any risk he decided to wait for the 5,000 Qazaq troops
which he had been promised by Abili Sultan and his brother Buhung. This was a
fatal mistake, for the delay undermined the morale of his own men and boosted the
morale of his nephews' supporters. In any case the Qazaq reinforcements were hardly
worth waiting for: - only Buhung Sultan arrived on 14 September and he brought a
mere 300 men. His brother sent word that he would arrive the following day and Wali
Muhammad wasted one more day waiting for him.
While he was waiting Imam Quli attacked. If we are to credit Iskandar Beg, the
small Iranian contingent in his army showed their mettle by defending a small ruined
fort against an enemy force ten times larger. But Wali Muhammad was disheartened
when he heard that Abuli Sultan and his 5,000 men had in fact joined Imam Quli, as
did Ishim Sultan and his son. According to Mahmid b. Wali this was because all the
clerics of the area sided with Imam Quli and declared that his uncle was a heretic.32
However, an attempt was made to trick the khan into believing that Abuli Sultan
intended to change sides during the battle. Buhung Sultan even asked to be positioned
in the front line in order to help his brother get across safely, but as soon as he was
allowed to do so he went over to Imam Quli. His defection led to total confusion in
Wali Muhammad's camp and when Imam Quli's army advanced, the khan's army
broke ranks and fled. Wali Muhammad

was left with only 300 men, and clearly

facing defeat. Perhaps because he realised the seriousness of the situation, he at last
showed some spirit and, like his brother at Pul-i Salar, he fought with great courage
until he was knocked off his horse and wounded, when he was taken prisoner and
put to death by order of Imam Quli. He was then 51 years old.?3
Of Wali Muhammad's 200 Iranian troops only 40 to 60 managed to get back to
Khurasan by disguising themselves as merchants and leaving Bukhara in the
company of a merchant from Marw. Mirza Beg claims that many of them fell victims
to Sunni fanatics on their way, which is hardly surprising because Shah ‘Abbas's
support for Wali Muhammad had increased the hatred which the local Sunni
population felt for every Iranian Shi‘a. And if Falsafi is to be believed those of Wali

32 Iskandar Beg, 843-6. Mahmid b. Wali, 98b. The knowledge that Imam Quli had the support of
the clerics led to the extraordinary belief that his spiritual director, Khwajah Hashim, helped

during the battle by sending an arrow into the air. This caused a miraculous cloud of dust to arise
which concealed Imam Quli's army from his uncle's supporters, enabling him to take them
unawares and slaughter them. Muhammad Yusuf Munshi, 250b. Hajji Mir, 184b.
33 Muhammad Yusuf Munshi (250a) says this course of action was urged upon Imam Quli by
Khwajah Hashim, but Hajji Mir (184b) insists that the khwajah himself gave orders for the
execution without, apparently, consulting Imam Quli. For more information about Wali
Muhammad's last campaign and death see Mahmud b. Wali (Ethé), 99a-b; Iskandar Beg, 846-7 :
Hajji Mir, 181a, 184a-5a; Jalal al-Din Muhammad, 258b-9a; Ahmad b. Shams, 563b-4a; Lahauti,
I, i, 221; Qipchaq Khan, 271a-b.

133

Wali Muhammad
Muhammad's followers who were left behind were similarly put to death by the

populace in Iran.34
Wali Muhammad had achieved little during his reign, except to divide the khanate
which his brother had worked so hard to unite. He left behind a reputation for loose
living, indecision, and tyranny. His inordinate fear of his nephews as rivals for the
crown turned them into his enemies and eventually cost him his life. His friendship
with Iran did not help him, nor did it help his son, who from 1611 was forced to live

in exile, despite numerous attempts to regain a foothold in the khanate.
Wali Muhammad does not appear to have taken an interest in trade. No buildings,
secular or religious, are attributed to his reign. Few manuscripts were commissioned
by him. He was not very active either in the field of foreign relations. There is no
record of contact with either Muscovy or with India. And apart from Iran with whom
he established good relations, his only other contact seems to have been with the chief
of the Noghay Great Horde, Ishterek, to whom he sent an embassy in 1608 and

whose subjects kept Bukhara supplied with valuable Russian slaves.3>

34 Iskandar Beg, 847. Mirza Beg, 352a. Falsafi, IV, 139; 1983 edition, II, 1452. In fact Wali
Muhammad' son Rustam Muhammad was left unharmed, as were some of his supporters.
35 Gnevushev, 178, 193.

134

6
Imam Quli's long reign
(1611-1641)

Imam Quli resumed his rule over the khanate at his uncle's death. There was no
general opposition to him, for his uncle had become universally hated and feared
during his second tenure of office. However, Imam Quli's relations with the Juibari
shaikhs were less than friendly. He punished ‘Abd al-Rahim Khwajah for having
supported his uncle by expelling him from the khanate and confiscating all his
possessions.! As a result the young khan lost the support of the other Jiibari shaikhs,
but he was still able to rely for advice and help on a religious personality of similar
standing and influence both in the khanate and abroad, Khwajah Hashim of Deh Pidi,
who undertook several delicate diplomatic missions on his behalf.2
The first few years of Imam Quli's reign were marked by an almost constant
struggle with Wali Muhammad's son in the south, and with the Qazaq Princes Ishim,
Tursun and Abuli in the north-east. Despite these difficulties, he followed events in
Kashghariya with great interest, and when a number of Princes from that country,
who had been exiled by the new ruler, Shuja‘ al-Din Ahmad (1609-10 to 1615), came
to live in the khanate, he welcomed them warmly. Two of these Princes, Abu Sa‘id

and his nephew, Shah Haidar Muhammad Sultan, were the ones whose rebellion may
have triggered off the Bukharan campaign to Kashghariya of 1594. They were
followed to the khanate by Abu Sa‘id's son, ‘Abd al-Karim, and, perhaps because
Imam Quli could not decide which of the three Princes to support as a candidate for
the Kashghariyan throne, he took no action on their behalf. However, he treated them

generously, as did Nadir Muhammad. They appointed Shah Haidar Muhammad
Sultan governor of Samarqand and named ‘Abd al-Karim governor of Kishm in

Badakhshan.3
To return to Imam Quli's struggle with Rustam
the exact sequence of events is unclear, but this
instructed by his father, Rustam Muhammad Khan
in August 1611, with large numbers of Bukharan

Muhammad and with the Qazaqs,
seems to be what happened. As
marched to the province of Balkh
and Iranian armed followers. On

this occasion Nadir Muhammad was unable to defend the province himself, as he had

been summoned by his brother to help in the fight against Wali Muhammad. He
therefore named a trusted amir to each of the towns of the region and, hoping that

1 Ivanov, Khozyaistvo, 77.
2 He was the descendant of the famous Khwajah Mahdum-i A‘zam.
3 Shah Mahmid, 56a. Bartol'd, Sochineniya, VIII, 178. Mahmud b. Wali (Ethé), 275a, gives no date
for ‘Abd al-Karim's arrival in the khanate.

Imam Quli

they would be a match for his cousin, he left for Samarqand. During his absence
Rustam Muhammad raided the outskirts of Balkh and the countryside near Jijektu, but

was defeated and apparently left the area.4
While this was happening in the south Imam Quli became disenchanted with the
Qazaqs. He was disappointed that despite his nomination of Tursun Muhammad
Sultan's son to Tashkent, neither of these Princes had helped him against his uncle.
As for Abuli Sultan, although he sided with Imam Quli in the decisive battle against
Wali Muhanmmad, he also tried to sack his ally's camp in the course of the battle, and
he later ravaged the area surrounding Samarqand. Such behaviour clearly had to be
stopped. Imam Quli accordingly sent his brother with an army against the Qazagqs in
1612, and when they saw that he meant to be firm, representatives from most of their
settlements came over with messages of submission. A few months later Ishim Sultan
himself made indirect approaches to Imam Quli, assuring the khan's courtiers of his
loyalty. Imam Quli responded at once by naming Ishim's son governor of Tashkent
and Turkestan in place of Tursin Muhammad's son, but, strangely enough, Ishim
was not pleased with this arrangement. Shortly afterwards he and Abuli Sultan even
joined together to threaten the towns of Tashkent and Turkestan. Imam Quli was
preparing to march against them himself, when he heard that Rustam Muhammad had
come back to Jijektu with an army. In view of this he decided to remain in Samarqand
and to monitor from there the progress of three armies which he sent off,
respectively, to Tashkent, Turkestan and Balkh.
All three armies were successful. Abuli fled towards the Sary Su and Lake
Balkash, Ishim Sultan made for the Qipchaq steppes and Rustam Muhammad
hastened to Fara and Sistan. Only Rustam Muhammad Khan presented a serious
threat and inflicted any casualties on Imam Quli's troops. This time he had seized the
governor of Jijektu, “Abdallah Bik Qipchaq, and forced the governor of Maimana to
flee for refuge to the citadel of Darra-yi Juz Jazrawan,> before he was crushed by the
diwanbegi Allahyar, who had returned to the area after helping Yalangtish Bi to deal
with Ishim Sultan in Tashkent.¢ Although Rustam Muhammad had been forced to
leave the area and had lost many of his followers during his flight he had managed to
secure the allegiance of the capable ‘Abdallah Bik Qipchaq, which was a serious blow
for Imam Quli and his brother.
The following year the khanate was again under attack. Rustam Muhammad
himself does not appear to have been involved, for he was in Iran.” Having received
warm messages of condolence and support from Shah ‘Abbas after his father's death,
he had turned to him for help after his defeat of 1612. And while he was in Iran
conditions in Gharjistan became very difficult. Shortages of food and pasture were
such that those of his followers who had remained there decided to join ‘Abdallah Bik
and the Qipchaqs in a bid for the southern parts of the province of Balkh. The local
4 Mahmid b. Wali (Ethé), 100a, 185b.
5 This was probably situated near Maimana and not to be confused with Darra-yi Gaz, which is due
south of Balkh.
6 Mahmud

b. Wali (Ethé), 99b-101la,

184b, 185b-7a. Iskandar Beg does not mention Rustam

Muhammad's first two campaigns. He says that the Prince remained in Herat when his father
returned to the khanate, but this seems unlikely if, as reported by Iskandar Beg himself (839), Wali

Muhammad earlier asked the Shah to send troops (to the khanate) with his son. No doubt the khan

expected his son to make a useful diversion in the south of the country.
7 Mahmid b. Wali’s account of this campaign is preferred to that of Iskandar Beg, for he was living
near the scene of these events, in Balkh.

136

1611-41

governors, who were unprepared for the attack, tried to fight them off, but many
fortresses fell, yielding much-needed provisions to Rustam Muhammad's followers.
Ten days later a Bukharan army arrived on the scene. A fierce battle was fought and
although, as a result, the assailants left the area, they succeeded in inflicting heavy
casualties on the Bukharan side and in taking back many prisoners, including one of
the amirs sent against them. Rustam Muhammad was delighted with his followers’
success. He sent some of the booty and prisoners to the Shah and decided to make
another onslaught on the province as soon as circumstances were favourable.8
Shortly afterwards the Qazaqs seized Turkestan and Tashkent.? Imam Quli and
his brother marched against them, determined to go as far as their settlements in the
Qipchaq steppes in order to teach them a lesson. They set off in the direction of
Sighnaq, sending various amirs ahead of them to Turkestan and Sabran. But by the
time the khan and his brother arrived in the area most of the Qazaqs had fled to the
steppes. Only Abuli Sultan remained under siege in Turkestan, with Ishim
presumably in control of Tashkent. Imam Quli was about to march to the steppes as
planned, leaving his amirs to retake Turkestan and Tashkent, when he was told that a
major rebellion had broken out in Andijan and Farghana, with Qazaq support. This
was a new and worrying development which called for instant action. He decided to
concentrate his forces in that area instead and to march there, together with his amirs.
The amirs were told to abandon the siege of Turkestan which they did reluctantly as
they felt sure that victory was within their grasp, and they made for Khujand. On their
way they met Ishim Sultan's rival, Tursin Muhammad Sultan, who offered his
allegiance.!° Imam Quli named this Prince governor of Tashkent and left him to deal
with Ishim Sultan. Then he marched on, only to find that the situation was under
control. Nadir Muhammad, who had been sent on ahead, had already defeated the
Andijan rebels.!1 Imam Quli remained a few days in the area, visiting the local
shrines and when he became convinced that the rebellion was well and truly over, he
returned home and permitted his brother to return to Balkh.
However, shortly after Nadir Muhammad

arrived in Balkh he was summoned

again by his brother. A new rebellion having broken out in Andijan, he and his army
were required to put it down. This was most unwelcome news to Nadir Muhammad,
not only because he was reluctant to set off again so soon, but because he had been
told that Rustam Muhammad had returned to Gharjistan and was waiting for a chance
to attack. He made representations to his brother, but Imam Quli was not convinced
that the situation was serious. He repeated his orders and Nadir Muhammad was
8 Mahmid b. Wali (Ethé), 188a-9b. Iskandar Beg, 857, gives a rather garbled version of this
campaign, in which he does not mention ‘Abdallah Bik. He says that Rustam Muhammad left
Herat secretly for Gharjistan in order to raid the province of Balkh in the Year of the Rat (March
1612-March

1613), and when he returned to Herat, he sent part of his booty to the governor,

Husain Khan to pacify him. He also wrote to the Shah to apologise for having left Khurasan so
abruptly, although by Iskandar Beg's own admission Rustam Muhammad had been warmly
welcomed on his arrival in Gharjistan by order of the Shah, which implies that the Shah had
known all along about his intended campaign!
9 Iskandar Beg, 865-6, says the Qazaqs defeated the Uzbegs near Tashkent. Mahmid b. Wali (Ethé),
101b, says nothing about this, but it seems clear from his account of Imam Quli's campaign that
it was motivated by the earlier capture of Turkestan and Tashkent by the Qazaqs.

10 He was the son of Jaim Sultan, perhaps identical with the Jalim Sultan killed by Baba Sultan in
1580.
11 Mahmid b. Wali (Ethé), 101b-3b. Muhammad Yisuf Munshi, 253a-b, says Imam Quli inflicted a

signal defeat on the Qazags in 1021/1612-3.

137

Imam Quli

forced to obey. When he left for Samarqand in the spring of 1613, he entrusted Balkh
to the ataliq Abd al-Rahman Ushin, a trusted amir who had saved him and his brother
from the field of Pal-i Salar in 1599.12
As soon as Nadir Muhammad left Balkh Rustam Muhammad Khan's supporters
made a bid for Balkh, and there seems to be little doubt that after an initial success,
they were defeated and fled towards Khurasan. Historians, however, differ in their

accounts and two main versions exist of what happened on that occasion. The most
colourful and better known version of events is that of Iskandar Beg, which is closely
followed by Hajji Mir. According to this Rustam Muhammad's army was so large
(3,000 men) that the official in charge of Balkh (the ataliq “Abd al-Rahman) was
unable to resist. He retired to the citadel and wrote to the Prince saying that, although
he would not deny him the rest of the town, he would have to defend the women in
the citadel in order to save his honour and reputation. The pretender, who did not
realise that ‘Abd al-Rahman had sent to Nadir Muhammad for reinforcements, was
well satisfied by his letter. Ignoring the citadel as unimportant, he disbanded his army
and settled down in the town to enjoy his conquest. Interestingly enough, in this
Iranian version Nadir Muhammad's Iranian mother is said to have played a significant
role in helping to deceive the pretender.!3 She allegedly promised him her daughter
and even suggested that the khanate be divided between him and his cousins. As a
result, Rustam Muhammad was totally unprepared when Nadir Muhammad's
reinforcements arrived and he was forced to flee. He set off for Maruchaq with an
armed escort of between 20 and 30 men, some of whom attempted to betray him on

the way, and when he finally reached Herat their numbers had dwindled to 10.14
A less spectacular, but more likely version of events is told by Mahmid b. Wali.
He makes no mention of Nadir Muhammad's mother and her conciliatory messages,
but explains that two attacks were carried out on Balkh during Nadir Muhammad's
absence. The first was led once again by Abdallah Bik Qipchaq. Attacking shortly
after Nadir Muhammad's departure, he took a number of amirs by surprise at Farab
and defeated them, then he marched on Balkh. By the time he arrived there, however,
‘Abd al-Rahman had rallied all the people of the town and the surrounding villages.
Together with all the religious dignitaries and mullas, the ‘big and small’ marched out
of the town in battle order, met ‘Abdallah Bik on the battlefield, and forced him to
leave the province. Some time later, in circumstances which are not clearly explained,
Rustam Muhammad took the outer quarters of Balkh. ‘Abd al-Rahman was forced to
flee to the citadel but he wisely refrained from fighting back in order to lull Rustam
Muhammad into a false sense of security. Then he attacked at dead of night and
Rustam Muhammad, taken unawares, fled for Herat with a small number of

followers.1!5
While this was happening in Balkh Nadir Muhammad was intervening in a Qazaq
12 Not ‘Abd al-Rahman Qanghan as in Mahmid b. Wali (Ethé), 104a, this being the name of the

traitor who supported Jahangir Sultan in 1607.
13 She was the daughter of the guardian of Imam Rida's shrine in Mashhad.
14 Iskandar Beg, 865-6, appears to place Rustam's discomfiture in May. Hajji Mir, 187a-b, places it

earlier and says he fled to Gharjistan after being defeated in battle on 8 Rabi‘I 1022/28 April 1613.

15 Mahmid b. Wali (Ethé), 190a-1b, 231b-2a. Ahmad b. Shams, 564a, gives a similar version of
Rustam Muhammad's expedition, although he insists that a battle was fought, during which the
Prince was temporarily taken prisoner. Later he was freed by ‘Abdallah Bik Qipchaq and escaped to

Gharjistan, at which stage ‘Abdallah Bik himself fell into the hands of the ishik aqasi Nadiri.

138

1611-41

feud on behalf of Tursin Muhammad Sultan. This Prince's appointment to Tashkent
had been bitterly resented by the other Qazaq Princes, and especially by Ishim Sultan,
who had been offered the same appointment only a year earlier, and who, as
Tawakkul's brother, probably considered himself his senior. Although, according to

a Muscovite ambassador who was in the khanate in the early 1620s, Tursin
Muhammad was in fact older, and thus senior to him,!6 Ishim Sultan persuaded his
fellow-Qazagqs, together with the Qirghiz and the Qalmaq, to sack the encampment of
his rival's clan. Tursin Muhammad appealed for help to his suzerain, Imam Quli, and
since Nadir Muhammad had not yet left Samarqand for Andijan when this message
was received, he was sent instead to Ura Tipa to deal with the situation. Yalangtish
Bi, who had already reached Andijan, was ordered to join him at Ura Tipa and
together they fell upon Turstn Muhammad's enemies. After inflicting heavy
casualties upon them they continued together towards Andijan, Yalangtish Bi
hurrying ahead ‘like a hurricane’.
The governor of Andijan, a certain Abi ’1-Muhammad, son of Imam Quli's late
enemy Kildi Muhammad, had dealt very harshly with the local people and not
surprisingly had become very unpopular. He had also tried to rule independently from
his suzerain. He held out against the khan's armies but, whether or not he managed to
hold out for three months, as alleged by the Iranian contemporary, Ahmad b. Shams
al-Din, he eventually had to sue for peace and to restore Imam Quli's name in the
khutbah and on the local coins.

After the campaign had come to a successful conclusion Nadir Muhammad
returned to Balkh. As peace then reigned in the province he was able to concentrate on
enhancing the quality, and increasing the variety of its produce by dint of irrigation,

and also by importing interesting fruit trees, flowers and herbs.!7
Meanwhile in Bukhara Imam Quli felt free at last to turn his attention to foreign
affairs. An interesting insight into his relations with Iran can be found in a report on
the interrogation of his commercial envoy, Khwajah Nauruz, by the voevoda of
Samara. Khwajah Nauruz, who was sent to Muscovy circa September 1613, said that
his master had good relations with Iran. However, although he explained that
embassies and traders were sent to and fro, he disclosed that Imam Quli had recently

rejected a suggestion by Shah ‘Abbas for joint action against the Ottomans. The khan
had apparently declared that the suggestion was ‘contrary to precedent’. Imam Quli's
answer was a diplomatic masterpiece. It concealed his anger at Shah ‘Abbas's known
encouragement of Rustam Muhammad. It gave the impression that their relations were
friendly, because he did not want the Shah to march to Balkh in support of Rustam
Muhammad's very real claim to the throne. And it hinted at his reluctance to form an
alliance with the heretic Shi‘a ruler against the head of the Sunni world. Shah ‘Abbas
cannot have been unduly irked by the rebuff. He had neither wanted nor expected
help from the khan. He wanted Imam Quli to know that he was well disposed
towards the khanate and had no intention of marching there in the near future, thus
dissociating himself in advance from any attack which Rustam Muhammad might be
planning. He hoped that the khan would respond to his approach by respecting the
integrity of Khurasan while he himself was campaigning against Turkey and Georgia
16 Khilkov, 421. Khokhlov reported in 1622 that Tursan Muhammad
busurmanskomu zakonu doshlo tsartsvo do nego.

was bol’shoi, a po ikh

17 Mahmid b. Wali (Ethé), 104a-6a. Ahmad b. Shams, 564a. Mahmad b. Wali, More tain, 24, 21.
139

Imam Quli

in the west. And he no doubt instructed his official biographer, Iskandar Beg, to
represent all Rustam Muhammad's campaigns in Khurasan as undertaken without his
knowledge or approval.!8
In fact relations were not as good as Khwajah Nauriz painted them. This was
clear from the reaction of the Iranian envoy to Muscovy to a suggestion that he should
return to Iran via Bukhara in late 1613. He was very reluctant to do so, for there was
war ‘between the Shah and Yurgench and Bukhara’. He added that ‘the Shah had
taken many towns’, by which he no doubt referred to “Abdallah Bik's earlier
successes, and he only agreed to travel via Bukhara after the Muscovite authorities
accepted his suggestion that they keep a number of Bukharans hostage in Kazan’ until
he reached his destination. Khwajah Naurwz, on the other hand, followed the official

line and, no doubt because his own life was not at stake, and because he was hoping
to avoid being detained in Muscovy, he insisted that his country had harmonious

relations with Iran.19
Khwajah Nauriz had been sent to renew relations between Bukhara and
Muscovy. His brief was to ascertain whether the new Tsar, Mikhail Romanov, truly
held sway over ‘Vladimir, Muscovy and all Russia’. He was also expected to
purchase a variety of valuable goods for Imam Quli's own use. Tsar Mikhail, first of
the Romanov dynasty, had only recently been elected Tsar at the end of the period of
disorder, civil strife and foreign occupation, known as the Time of Troubles, which
followed the death of Ivan the Terrible. During that period Muscovy had been overrun
by Poland and Sweden. Gangs of Cossacks and robbers had terrorised the population
and killed foreign merchants, including some from the khanate. Several ‘false Dimitri’
had tried to seize the throne, and three monarchs, Boris Godunov, Vasilii Shuisky

and the Polish Prince Vladislav had controlled the fate of Muscovy.2° On 23 July
1613 Mikhail Romanov, who was distantly related to Ivan the Terrible, had been
chosen to rule Russia by the unanimous vote of a special assembly, the zemskii
sobor,2! but it was some time before he was in full control of the country.
In the letter which Khwajah Naurtz delivered to ‘the Christian chief of all
Russians’ Imam Quli expressed the wish to establish relations with the Tsar similar to
the ‘loving relations’ which had existed in the past between their countries. He asked
for his envoy to be allowed to purchase goods freely, including gerfalcons and
‘pleasing’ suits of armour. He required the Muscovite authorities to protect Khwajah
Nauruz from hardship and loss, and also to provide him with an escort when he
travelled from town to town. Finally he promised to do likewise for any commercial
envoys or ambassadors who might be sent to the khanate by the Tsar.
Khwajah Nauruz's stay in Muscovy, however, was less than happy. His letters
of credence and gifts for the Tsar were seized when he arrived in Samara on 27
December 1613. He was kept there over a year. It was February 1615 before he was
at last permitted to leave for Kazan' and to travel freely in Muscovy. And only then
was he given some idea of the date when he might at last leave the country. It is not
known whether he was able to leave Muscovy that spring, as suggested by the

18 Iskandar Beg, 857.
19 Pamyatniki, XXI, 170, 261-2, 169.
20 Riasanovsky, 172-91.
21 Pipes, 107, says that the correct term for these assemblies should simply be sobor, the expression
zemskii sobor being a nineteenth century invention.

140

1611-4]

authorities, or whether he succeeded in purchasing the gerfalcons, suits of armour,
walrus tusks and black foxes required by his master. However, it seems clear that the
Tsar did not want him to take back the impression that the new ruler of Muscovy was
actively hostile towards the khanate. For that reason his officials were careful to
explain to Khwajah Nauruz that they had only detained him in the country for his own
good, both because the province of Astrakhan ‘was disrupted owing to a rebellion
and therefore dangerous’, and because ‘it was impossible for him to leave during the
(harsh) winter’ .22
There was certainly an element of truth in this, for Astrakhan was then in the
hands of False Dmitri's widow, Marina Mniszek, and the Cossack leader Ivan
Zarutskii. Both had refused to recognise Tsar Mikhail and both were determined
either to seize the throne on behalf of Marina's infant child, or else to secede. Shortly
before Khwajah Nauruz's arrival they had even offered Astrakhan to Shah ‘Abbas in
return for his support.23 This had to be prevented at all costs. Tsar Mikhail had
therefore decided to send an ambassador of his own to the Iranian ruler and this
decision was directly responsible for Khwajah Nauruz's detention. The Muscovite
ambassador, Tikhanov, and his Iranian counterpart could not take the usual route to
Iran via the Caspian because it was blocked by rebels. They were despatched instead
overland via Urganj, Bukhara and Khurasan, and Khwajah Nauriz was held hostage,
together with a large number of Bukharan and Khwarazmian merchants, in order to
guaranteee them a safe journey. This was made quite clear in the letters which
Tikhanov carried for Imam Quli and ‘Arab Muhammad of Khwarazm: either they
provided the Tsar's envoy with an escort, treated him honourably and caused him no
delay, or else Tsar Mikhail would retaliate against their nationals then in Muscovy.4
In the event, however, Tikhanov did not travel through the khanate. On reaching
Urganj on his outward jouney, he was advised to go straight to Khurasan, so he
made his way via Darun, Nesa and Mashhad, and arrived in Qazwin in the autumn of

1614.
Khwajah Nauriz's excessively protracted detention had thus proved to be
completely useless, as well as unmerited. The generous food and living allowance
which he had been given during his stay could hardly compensate for it. He had not
been treated correctly and Imam Quli would not be inclined to send another envoy to
Muscovy for some time.
Tikhanov's journey had been far more successful. Having reached Iran safely, he
had seen Shah ‘Abbas several times and had secured his promise that he would help
Tsar Mikhail against his enemies. Tikhanov was able to take the direct route back to
Muscovy because Astrakhan had been reclaimed from Zarutskii. And when he arrived
in Moscow in the spring of 1615 he gave the Tsar an up-to-date view of IranoBukharan relations which sharply contrasted with that of Khwajah Nauruz. It so
happened that an envoy from Rustam Muhammad Khan had been present at
Tikhanov's audience on 30 December 1614 and had been given the best place at table.
He had come to ask for an army with which to fight ‘the rulers of Bukhara’ and the
Shah had apparently responded favourably, not only offering him soldiers, money
and even a ‘voevoda’ for this purpose, but also suggesting that he should prepare to
22 Pamyatniki, XXI, 259, 165-6, 168, 175. Materialy, 112.
23 Pamyatniki, XXI, 222.

24 Thid., 179-80.
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Imam Quli

march there in the near future.25 So much for Khwajah Nauriz's optimism with
regard to Irano-Bukharan relations!
Imam Quli's relations with Khwarazm were much sounder than they were with
either Muscovy or Iran. The new ruler, ‘Arab Muhammad, was the son of Hajjim
Muhammad. He was also Imam Quli's son-in-law and as such he ensured that no
difficulties were made for Bukharan merchants and ambassadors travelling through
Khwarazm. Khwajah Nauruz had therefore travelled to Muscovy via Urganj, joining
forces with merchants from both countries and also with two fellow ambassadors
from Bukhara and Khwarazm who had been sent to Ishterek, chief of the Great
Horde of Noghays. Both Imam Quli and ‘Arab Muhammad were concerned that the
Great Horde had recently begun to camp on the Crimean side of the Volga. They
hoped to persuade Ishterek to return to his former encampments on the left bank of
the river and on the Yaik, these settlements having proved a convenient and safe
stopping-place for their merchants and ambassadors on their way to and from
Muscovy. Ishterek's decision to move his camping-grounds had been taken in the
aftermath of a number of violent Cossack attacks on Astrakhan and its region, and
directly following a major Qalmaq raid on his encampment near the Yaik river in
1613. This was the first appearance of the Qalmag tribes in the area but, as these
nomads, who originated in Western Mongolia, had devastated Khwarazm in 1604
and 1607, Ishterek feared that they might want to take over all the Great Noghays'
traditional camping-grounds.?° He had decided therefore to move westwards in order
to avoid further trouble. In the event, however, he reconsidered his decision. Whether
or not this was due to the entreaties of Imam Quli and ‘Arab Muhammad and to a
possible offer of support from both quarters, he returned to the right bank of the
Volga and was still camping there in 1619.27
The next few years were peaceful in the khanate. Discouraged by the disastrous
campaign of 1613, Rustam Muhammad settled down in Herat, where he married and
began a family. In the east Turstn Muhammad's enemies had been so thoroughly
disheartened by their latest defeats that they refrained from attacking the khanate. And
as for Tursin Muhammad, he behaved for some time in an exemplary manner. Thus

it was well known in 1616 that ‘Tursin...ruler of Savran’ would not take it upon
himself to write to the various Siberian voevody, or to receive their envoys and
conduct negotiations with them. Instead he most properly referred their

communications and envoys to his suzerain Imam Quli.28
This enabled Imam Quli to take a more active interest in Khurasan. He knew that
the pretender had been given asylum there, and had also been allowed to use the
province as a base for attacking the region of Balkh. Whether or not he suspected that
Rustam Muhammad might be planning a new expedition against the khanate with the
support of the Shah, he appears to have encouraged his amirs to raid the province as a
warning and in reprisal for past attacks. However, he himself took no direct action
against Khurasan. The first raid was led by Yalangtish Bi in late 1614. During Shah
‘Abbas's lengthy Georgian campaign he marched on Marw with 20,000 men and

25 Ibid., 276-7, 289, 298, 309.
26 Aba ’|-Ghazi, tr. 296-7, text 275-6. The four main branches of the Qalmaq (Kalmuck) were the
Torgouts, the Sungars or Zhungars, the Khoshouts and the Derbets. The Khoshouts claimed

descent from a brother of Gengis Khan's.

27 Bogoyavlenskii, "Materialy," 60.
28 Hajji Mir, 187b. Materialy po istorii russko-mongol'skikh otnoshenii, I, 49.
142

1611-41

defeated a body of scouts outside this town. Both sides then prepared for a siege and
Yalangtish sent troops to ravage the countryside near Mashhad. Shortly afterwards,

however,? the Shah left Georgia for Gilan. By March 1615 Yalangtish was told that
he was in Mazandaran and that, to quote the English ambassador to India, Sir Thomas
Roe, having ‘made lately a Road with fire and sword upon the poore Georgian
Christians, and subdued them, and being of a spirit naturally unpeaceful’, he was
preparing ‘for the conquest of Samarcand...(and for) the punishing of a valiant Race

of Tartars, called Usbiques’.° Since he had neither sufficient resources nor Imam
Quli's permission to fight Shah ‘Abbas and his army, Yalangtish Bi was forced to
raise the siege and return to the khanate. But he did not go back empty-handed. He
took back much booty and also many peasants from Marw whom he presumably sold
as slaves in the khanate.
A few months later it was the turn of another Bukharan amir, Qara Tughma, to

raid Khurasan. His first expedition involved some 4-5,000 men. They marched from
Balkh, raided the area of Jam and Bokharz and returned unchallenged with their
booty. In view of this success Qara Tughma mounted another expedition with a
smaller number of men, but this time he was not successful. According to Iskandar
Beg he failed to take the fort of Karukh and was later surprised in his camp at dawn
by a force of about 900, all experienced warriors, who came over from Herat. A short
and fierce battle followed, and he was forced to flee, leaving behind many casualties

and much booty.3!
That same year Imam Quli made a first, albeit indirect, attempt to establish
relations with the Mughal Emperor Jahangir. He must have been concerned to hear
that there had been an obvious rapprochement between Jahangir and Shah ‘Abbas in
1614. According to Sir Thomas Roe, Jahangir had not only ignored an Ottoman
request for help against Iran that year, but he had given their ‘ambassage...very harsh
entertainment, made him Salem to the ground, and as soone as he was dismissed,

sent the Persian ten Leckes of Rupies’.32 Imam Quli was determined not to risk a
similar response. He therefore prevailed upon his adviser and mentor, Khwajah
Hashim of Deh Pidi, to write to the Emperor. The khwajah's letter, which included a

friendly message, a blessing and a short poem, was well received by Jahangir, who
sent back a gift of money and a short poem of his own composition in December
1615. This seemed most encouraging but nothing came of such an auspicious
beginning. Ten months later, in October 1616 the Emperor would tell an English
visitor, Thomas Coryate, who expressed the desire to visit the tomb of ‘the Lord of

the Corners’ (Tamerlane) in Samarqand that ‘there was no great amity betwixt the
Tartarian Princes and himselfe, so that his commendatory Letters would doe
(Coryate) no good....(and) he earnestly dissuaded (the Englishman) from the

journey’
.33 This did not mean that Jahangir had ceased to hanker for the khanate and
for its wealth of varied and tasty fruit. On the contrary, such was his delight when
courtiers, officials and foreign visitors brought him fruit from the khanate as their

offering, that he never failed to enter the occasion in his diary!34

29 In December 1614.
30 Roe, "Observations", 441.
31 Iskandar Beg, 884, 879, 893-4. Karukh was apparently situated near the frontier with the khanate.

32 One million rupees. Roe, as above.

33 Aba ’1-Muzaffar, 149. Purchas, III, 598-9.
34 Aba ’1-Muzaffar, 173, 277.
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Imam Quli

During 1616 relations between the khanate and Iran were surprisingly peaceful.
The fact that neither side attacked the other was expressed rather colourfully by an
Iranian commercial envoy to Muscovy, Mamet Kazim (Muhammad Qasim), who
stated in Kazan’ that autumn that ‘the Bukharan and Yurgench rulers were submissive
and obedient to the Shah’ and that ‘when he ordered them to go somewhere they did,
and they came and helped’. There is no doubt that the rulers of Bukhara, Khwarazm
and Iran were then at peace, but it was not true to say that any one of them actually
‘obeyed’ another. Perhaps Muhammad Qasim was referring to the IranoKhwarazmian campaign against the Ottoman Sultan, which, according to Khwajah
Nauraz and the merchants interrogated in Muscovy in 1613, had been under
consideration in 1613. If indeed ‘Arab Muhammad did side with the Shi‘a leader
against one who was generally considered the head of the Sunni world, his action
would certainly have displeased Imam Quli. However, his disapproval must have
been tempered by the knowledge that ‘Arab Muhammad had been driven to this
course of action by what appears to have been an earlier Ottoman attack on
Khwarazm, against which he was now retaliating. The envoy whom ‘Arab
Muhammad despatched to Moscow in about July 1616 was therefore able to declare
emphatically in January 1617 that there was ‘no disagreement whatsoever’ between
this ruler and Imam Quli.35
The peaceful lull between Bukhara and Iran came to an end in March 1617 when a
three-pronged and very successful Bukharan attack was launched against Iranian
territory. Although neither Imam Quli himself nor his brother was involved, there can
have been little doubt that the raids were approved by the khan, since one of the raids
was conducted by a very senior amir, the Qalmaq Muhammad Baqi Bi. Taking
advantage of the fact that Shah “Abbas was wintering in far-away Qarabagh,
Muhammad Baqi Bi attacked the shores of the Caspian, subjecting the area of
Mazandaran and Astarabad to ‘exemplary punishment’. At the same time Muhammad

Quli Durman and 1,200 men marched from Andkhud to Sarakhs, first defeating the
governor of Maruchaq, and killing the governor of Sarakhs during a second battle.
While this was happening in Khurasan Qara Tughma penetrated into Iran as far as
Yazd and came back with a lot of booty, which included large quantities of cattle.3®
Shah ‘Abbas must have been worried by the success of these raids and by the
ease with which the raiders had penetrated well into the heart of his realm. However,

since no attempt at outright conquest had been made, and since he was hoping that a
definitive and satisfactory peace settlement would soon be agreed with the Ottomans,
he made no attempt at retaliation.
He would have been more concerned, however, had he known that the raids
followed an exchange of letters between the Ottoman Sultan Ahmad I and Imam Quli
in 1616 and 1617, in which the idea of joint action against Iran was put forward, and
Imam Quli stated his determination to avenge the death of his father at Pul-i Salar. If
Shah ‘Abbas had been aware of this correspondence he might have thought it
significant that Imam Quli should give himself out in his letter as the direct successor
of ‘Abdallah II.

35 Pamyatniki, XXII, 273; XXI, 170. Materialy, 113, 115.
36 Mahmiid b. Wali (Ethé), 192a, mentions all three attacks but gives no precise date for them.
Iskandar Beg, 913-4, only mentions the raid on Sarakhs and places it at the end of the Year of the

Dragon (March 1616-March 1617).

144

1611-41

Whether or not Imam Quli was hoping to emulate ‘Abdallah by conquering
Khurasan, it is most likely that the three-pronged Bukharan attack of March 1617 had
no more than a diversionary purpose. The idea was probably to force the Shah to
leave Armenia and Azerbaijan for Khurasan in order to give the Ottomans a breathingspace while they prepared for their next expedition against Iran. A joint OttomanBukharan attack should have followed, but the Bukharan campaign of December
1617 against Khurasan did not coincide with an Ottoman onslaught, as expected,
because Ahmad I died unexpectedly in late November 1617, and the warlike
posturings of his successor, his half-witted elder brother Mustafa I, came to

nothing.>7
Iskandar Beg's description of the campaign of December 1617 is less than
flattering to the Bukharan side. Imam Quli's uncle, who was also his diwanbegi, and

who was known as Nadir diwanbegi Tughai,38 apparently took 30,000 men via
Marw and Abiward to Nishapur, where he ravaged the countryside. Delighted with
his success, he was preparing to march on towards Mashhad when he was told that
the 1,500 experienced warriors who had been on their way to reinforce him had
suffered a disastrous defeat. In a fierce battle against a smaller force of 1,000
musketeers under the governor of Marw, Mehrab Khan, 500 of them had perished
and 250 had been taken prisoner. On hearing this Nadir diwanbegi apparently
changed his plans at once and withdrew to the khanate in a panic. Mehrab Khan then
sent a report to the Shah, together with ten high-ranking prisoners and, according to
Iskandar Beg, Shah ‘Abbas had all but two of them put to death. Only the
commanders of the force were spared and the Shah had them sent to Herat, from

whence they soon escaped back to the khanate.
If one comparés this account with that of the independent Italian observer, Della
Valle, who was in Mazandaran with the Shah at the time, it is clear that Iskandar

Beg's account was not only exaggerated, but also incorrect. The total number of
Bukharan casualties was far smaller and did not exceed 300. Della Valle, who noted
that their heads were strewn on the ground in the market-place of Farhabad by order
of the Shah, makes it clear that none of the eight or ten prisoners sent to the Shah was
put to death. On the contrary. The prisoners, whose heads and hands had been
imprisoned in large triangles of wood on their way to Mazandaran, were released
from their shackles as soon as they arrived in the province. They were well treated
throughout their captivity, which lasted three months, and during this time they
remained in close contact with Shah ‘Abbas who took them to Qazwin when he left

Farhabad. They were able to talk freely to Della Valle about the khanate and about the
circumstances surrounding their defeat. They explained to him that they generally
fought with swords, bows and arrows, and were thus powerless in a set battle against
men armed with harquebusses. Although they did have some harquebusses, not many
knew how to use them. In any case they did not like firearms, for they were too
heavy to carry on their usual lightning raids.
During their stay the captives were shown off by the Shah to his people and to
foreign ambassadors. Before they left in June 1618, Shah ‘Abbas plied them with
drink and gave them a long message to deliver to Imam Quli. He offered the khan his

37 Hammer, Histoire, VIII, 413-4 n, 233, 238. Iskandar Beg, 903-11.
38 Pisarchik, "O nekotorykh terminakh", 178. Lapin, 17. Tughai meant maternal uncle and that was
in fact Nadir diwanbegi's relationship to Imam Quli.

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friendship, pointed out that the Bukharans had never achieved any success against his
men except in raids, and promised that in future he would treat visitors from the
khanate just as courteously as he treated all other foreign visitors.
The Shah's extraordinary magnanimity, which puzzled Della Valle, is difficult to
explain. When Shah ‘Abbas spared their lives in the first place he made a cryptic
comment which implied that there were too few of them for a spectacular execution to
be worthwhile, as it could hardly increase his fame. In any case there were enough
heads of dead Bukharans in the market square to impress his people and the
ambassadors of Turkey, Spain and Britain. The Bukharan captives served a more
useful purpose as living proof of his success in the east, and they were put on show
during the following months whenever he had a grand reception at Court attended by
the foreign ambassadors and also by Della Valle. When a few months later Turkey
attacked Iran following the accession of Uthman II, it became even more necessary
for Shah ‘Abbas to keep the Bukharans alive, as his magnanimity was likely to deter
Imam Quli from launching a simultaneous attack from the east in support of the
Ottomans. By the time the men were released in June 1618 Turkey had sued for peace
and negotiations were in progress, but Shah “Abbas was still determined that nothing
would prevent the talks from reaching a satisfactory conclusion. It was important

therefore to establish good relations with Imam Quli.39 Shah ‘Abbas also needed the
co-operation of Bukharan officials and merchants for a new venture: he wanted to
develop trade with China. He knew that a yearly caravan was sent there from the
khanate and although he had made enquiries of Bukharan merchants, he felt sure that
he would get more reliable information once he was on good terms with Imam Quli.4°
By the time Shah “Abbas's offer of friendship and peace reached Imam Quli an
unsuccessful Bukharan raid had taken place near Herat. It had been undertaken by
Yalangtush Bi on hearing of the sudden death of the formidable governor of
Khurasan, Husain Khan Shamlu, who had held office for 20 years. Yalangtish Bi
had at once crossed the Syr-Darya with 1,000 men in order to ravage the area around
Herat only to find, to his disappointment, that the former governor's son, Hasan
Khan, had strengthened the defences of the town and prepared for a siege. Since the
advantage of surprise was lost and since he had not the slightest hope of storming
Herat with the men and weapons at his disposal, Yalangtish Bi left to make a bid for
Ghuriyan, but he met with stiff resistance and failed in his undertaking. He was then
told that Hasan Khan and Rustam Muhammad Khan had seized his baggage and the
horses left behind at Maimana and Jijektu. He therefore had little option but to give up
the expedition and return to the khanate.
In those circumstances Shah ‘Abbas's offer of peace was a welcome surprise for
Imam Quli and he hastened to respond. He sent an ambassador off to Iran whom the
Spanish ambassador Silva y Figueroa saw in Isfahan in April 1619. Silva was
impressed by the envoy's cheerfulness and refined speech, as well as his pleasant and
neat appearance, very similar to that of the people of Iran ‘en el trage con poca 6
ninguna diferengia de los persianos, con el turbante algo menor, pero el muy bien
dispuesto’. He was well treated in Isfahan, being placed at table between the
ambassadors of Turkey and India. They were all offered a meal consisting of rice,
greengages and a variety of wines instead of water, but none of the ambassadors

39 Iskandar Beg, 927-8, 930-8. Della Valle, Viaggi, II, 622-6, 725-9.
40 Silva, II, 378-9
146

1611-41

appears to have objected to this. And they were served by three long-haired young
men dressed in silk and gold.
Relations between Khwarazm and Bukhara were so good at the time that
according to Muscovite sources the Bukharan envoy stayed in Isfahan in the house of
a “Khwarazmian Crown Prince’, possibly Burundigq, nephew of ‘Arab Muhammad,
whom Shah ‘Abbas had kept in Iran in 1598 when his relatives returned to
Khwarazm. The ambassador was so much at ease in Isfahan that he felt able to lodge
a strong complaint against the Tsar's envoy for encouraging one of his Muscovite
slaves to run away, and this resulted in a lengthy investigation.4! It is not known
whether he signed a treaty of peace and friendship on behalf of Imam Quli during his
stay. But if he did so, which seems very likely, since both sides were interested in
avoiding further hostilities, the peace did not last, for in late 1620-early 1621, Rustam
Muhammad took advantage of Imam Quli's third expedition against Tashkent in order
to attack the khanate.
Before turning to this time of crisis in the khanate, let us review Imam Quli's
foreign relations during 1618 and 1619. Little is known about the Bukharan embassy
from Samarqand which arrived in China in 1618, but quite a bit of information is
available about the embassy of Adam Bik who was sent to Muscovy the following
year. He travelled to Astrakhan via the Noghay encampment situated near the Yaik
river. From Astrakhan he made his way to Moscow and he arrived there in August
1619 with his brother and a suite of ten. He brought with him a letter in which Imam
Quli made a serious effort to develop commercial and diplomatic relations with
Muscovy. The Bukharan ruler was already suffering from the shortage of money
which was to become a chronic problem, forcing him to debase the currency on at

least 57 occasions and to issue new coins with an artificially inflated value.42 Neither
his laisser-faire nor his generosity to courtiers had helped to fill his coffers. In order
to encourage trade between their countries, Imam Quli therefore suggested that
merchants be allowed to travel freely between the khanate and Muscovy. He also
offered the Tsar his friendship and promised to send back all the Muscovite slaves
who had been sold to the khanate by Noghay and Crimean traders, on condition that
an ambassador was sent to him from Moscow. Finally he asked the Tsar to send him
a gift of four gerfalcons.
The request for gerfalcons was not as strange a request as it might seem at first
sight, for at that time monarchs sent each other presents, or pominki, on a strictly
reciprocal basis, making sure that they obtained rare and valuable items in return. The
presents required were carefully listed in official letters and in the instructions given to
ambassadors, and an attempt was made to send gifts of a similar value in exchange.
In this case Imam Quli, who like all the rulers of the khanate and many of their
subjects, was keen on hunting, asked for the famous Siberian hunting-bird, a delicate
creature, which travelled badly and needed a daily ration of either one chicken, or two

pigeons, two young chicks er even a pigeon's nest. Gerfalcons were such valuable
birds that special bejewelled hoods and capes were made for them, and only specially
trained gerfalconers were trusted to look after them. In seventeenth-century Iran they

41 Silva, Il, 372, 374, 375, 377. Iskandar Beg, 941. Aba ’1-Ghazi, tr. 291, text 272. Pamyatniki,
XXII, 536-7, 600-613.
42 Mindai, 748, 750. Davidovich, "Monetnye nakhodki...1970", 278; Istoriya, 56, 71, 91-3, 96;
"Valdzheranskii sklad", 72-5.

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were reserved for the Shah and a single bird fetched 100 tuman, which seems to have
equalled between 1,500 and 1,600 écus.43 Imam Quli was so keen to obtain the
gerfalcons that he offered the Tsar ‘anything that he might wish’ in exchange.
Imam Quli's suggestion that he would release the Muscovite captives held in the
khanate at once recommended itself to Mikhail Romanov, for he needed as many
fighting men as possible to help him clear the country of its Polish invaders. In order
to demonstrate his pleasure and goodwill he received Adam Bik splendidly. The
envoy was brought to his audience on horses from the Imperial stables, riding
through streets lined with musketeers who formed a guard of honour. During the
audience he was permitted to kiss the Tsar's hand before it was placed protectively
over his head. Although the Tsar did not rise when enquiring about Imam Quli's
health, as he might have done in the case of the Shah or the King of Sweden, he wore
cloth of gold for the audience, as did many of his courtiers, an honour which was not
granted even to the envoys of the powerful khan of Crimea. Adam Bik received an
allowance of food and money throughout his stay to cover his needs as well as those
of his brother and manservant. When he left he was given a silver goblet, furs and
money for himself, together with money and woollen cloth for his suite. And in
answer to Imam Quli's request Tsar Mikhail sent an ambassador with him to the

khanate.“4
The Tsar's ambassador, Ivan Danilovich Khokhlov, was a very experienced man.
In 1600 he had looked after the Persian ambassador to Muscovy. He had spent two
years in Iran from 1613, during which time he made a very good impression on Shah
‘Abbas. On that occasion he had been sent by the rebel Zarutskii to offer Astrakhan to
the Shah in return for money and soldiers. Although this came to nothing, the fact that
Khokhlov had acted for the rebel did not endear him to Tsar Mikhail. However, he
had since managed to gain the Tsar's favour by persuading him that he had only acted
as Zarutskii's envoy under compulsion, and that, while in Iran, he had in fact done

his best to further the Tsar's interests.45
Khokhlov took Imam Quli four gerfalcons, complete with rich hoods and capes,
and a pair of hunting gauntlets. He also carried a long letter in which Tsar Mikhail
agreed to a free exchange of merchants between the two countries, and asked for all
Muscovite captives to be sent back with his ambassador without delay. In his
instructions to Khokhlov Tsar Mikhail qualified this sweeping request by specifying
that he intended his ambassador to obtain the release of all the nobles and all the
officers or syny boyarskie. He warned Khokhlov not to let it be known that some of
these men were nobles, for this would increase their ransom value, nor must he reveal
that they were ‘necessary’ to their country (as fighting-men). He was only to say that

the Tsar wanted them back for religious reasons, because they were fellow Orthodox
Christians. As for the other captives, who in the event turned out to be Cossacks,

peasants and women, Khokhlov was instructed to get ‘the best’ ones first. This
remark, often seized upon as an example of narrow class-consciousness, probably
owed its origin to the depleted state of Tsar Mikhail's army and Treasury. No doubt
43 Chardin, Voyages, III, 41-42, 380. Tavernier, Les six voyages, 1712 edition, I, 135. See further
in Burton, Bukharans in trade, 397 nn.9 and 10.

44 Khilkov, 426, 447-8. Yuldashev, K istorii torgovykh i posol'skikh svyazei, 39. S.G.G.D., IV,
343. Kotoshikhin, 76, 82-3. A.I., IV, 42-43.
45 Pamyatniki, XXI, 222, 293, 309-10, 349, 369, 416; XXII, 56-7.

148

1611-4]

officers would have been more useful to his army at the time and the ‘best’ people
would have been particularly valuable because their relatives were likely to repay their
ransom money, whereas the others would not be able to do so. In any case Tsar
Mikhail made it clear that he would be very pleased if all the captives were released: ‘Tf all are released so much the better’, Khokhlov was told. But the Tsar was mainly
concerned to limit his expenses, and that was why he added that if there were ‘too
many Captives, a hundred or two’, Khokhlov should ‘get them to walk rather than
hire carts’.
Tsar Mikhail had three other main objectives in sending Khokhlov. First he
wanted his name to be treated with respect in Central Asia. Khokhlov was told
therefore to prevail upon the khan to rise to his feet when asking about the Tsar's
health. And indeed Imam Quli failed to do so during the first audience, whereupon the
ambassador remonstrated with him, saying that ‘all the rulers, Christian and Muslim

and the Turks and the Persian Shah and all the great rulers lovingly rise when the
Tsar's name is mentioned’. For the same reason Khokhlov was to refuse, either to
share his audience with any other ambassador, or to pay any fees in order to obtain it.
The second objective of the mission was to persuade Imam Quli that Mikhail
Romanov fully controlled Muscovy, as well as the various Noghay tribes and the
tribes of the Kabarda area in central Caucasus. Khokhlov was to make it clear that all
these nomads were ‘obedient’, and that the Noghays of the Great Horde had even
asked the Tsar to choose them a new chief. With regard to Sweden and Poland, he

was to explain that the Swedes had evacuated Muscovy on hearing of Mikhail's
accession. As for the Poles, although they still held some Muscovite towns, they had
been crushed and the Tsar had only granted them a truce out of sheer magnanimity.
The third objective of the mission was to collect as much information as possible
about the khanate's military strength and about Imam Quli's existing and intended
relations with ‘Turkey, the Shah, Georgia, Yurgench’
.46
Khokhlov's mission was generally successful. He carried out all his allotted tasks
and also wrote a lengthy report about his embassy which is invaluable as a first-hand
account of the situation in the khanate. Not only is it full of a multitude of interesting
details but, above all, it is free from the wilful distortions found in the accounts of
Imam Quli's reign which were written, either by his panegyrists, or by his brother's
detractors.
Khokhlov set off from Kazan' in early July 1620 with Adam Bik and the
returning Khwarazmian ambassador. It took them six eventful months to reach

Bukhara in January 1621,47 by which time they had survived a shipwreck on the
Caspian and an attack on their camp at Tyup-Karagan by the Turkmen. The Turkmen
negotiated with them after a twenty-day siege and even agreed to sell them horses and
camels for the way, but that was not the end of the matter. The same Turkmen
attacked them later, chasing away their horses and camels and submitting them to a
second siege, this time seven weeks long, at a staging-post en route for Urganj. This
siege only came to an end after the starving ambassadors and their party of 30
merchants, and two interpreters, bought off their assailants with a selection of their

goods consisting of woollen cloth, Russian hides, knives and wooden dishes. Horses

46 Khilkov, 400, 439, 424-39.
47 No actual date is given for their arrival, but they must have arrived no later than 30th January, if
after spending 10 days in Bukhara and 15 days travelling to and from Samarqand, they were back
in Bukhara for Lent, which in that year started on 24th February (New Style).

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and camels were then purchased again from the Turkmen and the party set off.
However, it appeared that the Turkmen had a score to settle with Adam Bik, for they
singled him out on the way and robbed him of all his possessions.
There were further problems to face after the party reached the area under direct
Khwarazmian jurisdiction. Greedy officials demanded ‘gifts’ before letting them
through. In Urganj ‘Arab Muhammad's son Habash threatened them with arrest, and
only allowed them to leave the town after extracting further ‘gifts’ from them. They
were better treated in Khiva, where ‘Arab Muhammad invited them to a light meal and
provided them with food. He even then sent Khokhlov a number of parting-gifts, but
the official who brought them demanded a reward before he would agree to deliver
them. Khokhlov was indignant. He refused to comply with this request, but when he
sent word about it to the khan's close advisers, he found to his amazement that they
showed no concern. They even said that the official, Shigaul mirza, would be
rewarded for his action. Three days later Khokhlov was forced to give way, for he
had realised that Shigaul mirza was powerful enough to prevent him from leaving the
town. At this stage two more of the khan's sons, Sharif Muhammad and Abi ’IGhazi, threatened the ambassador with death unless he let them have a share of the
party's goods, and when Khokhlov approached the khan for help, ‘Arab Muhammad
protested that he was no more able to discipline them than to help the ambassador.
Khokhlov thereforehad to agree with their demands. After parting with yet more
hides, fur and cloth, he was at last permitted to leave Khiva, but his ordeal was not

yet over. Having been told that a laisser-passer (yarligh) would exempt him from
Customs dues, he accordingly paid for it in kind, only to find that the khan's yarligh
carried no weight with Sharif Muhammad's and Abt ’1-Ghazi's officials. They
stopped him a mere 24 km outside Khiva and after ‘a day and a night’ spent arguing
with them, he was obliged to pay what they required in the way of Customs dues.
During the next few days Khokhlov travelled in fear for his life, for he had been
warned that ‘Arab Muhammad had sent an armed gang of 80 to kill him. In the event,
however, no attack took place and he was able to cross the frontier safely into the

khanate.48
When Khokhlov arrived in Bukhara, he was told that Imam Quli was in
Samargand, on his way to fight Turstin Sultan of Tashkent. Relations between the
Qazaq and his overlord had suddenly deteriorated, but the reasons for this
deterioration are not clear. Turstin Sultan can hardly have blamed Imam Quli for the
numerous earthquake tremors of 1620 which devastated the countryside in an area
nearly 8 km in radius around Tashkent, and which caused the Syr-Darya to flood its
banks several times within six months.49 Khokhlov believed Imam Quli's recent
marriage to the daughter of ‘Tursiin's cousin’ (Ishim Sultan) to have been a sufficient
reason. In his report to the Tsar he explained that Ishim Sultan ‘now wanted to kill
Tursun and put his son-in-law (Imam Quli) on the throne in his place’, which showed
both misunderstanding of the situation, and a total misconception of the power and

standing of the Princes involved. It was Imam Quli who was the overall ruler and
who might have been tempted to oust Tursin Muhammad and replace him with his
new father-in-law Ishim Sultan. But it is unlikely that he would have risked
disrupting the peace of the eastern regions of the khanate for the sake of Ishim Sultan
48 Khilkov, 389-97.
49 Gorshkov, 62-63.
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with whom, in any case, his relations had been less than friendly. Ishim Sultan had
recently attacked the khan's camp at dawn, and it was only after peace between them
had been restored through the intervention of the Naqshbandi khwajahs, that the
Qazaq's daughter had been sent to Imam Quli as a token of their new understanding

and good relations.°°

It seems more likely that Tursin Muhammad had become restive and had attacked
out of fear that Imam Quli might be planning to demote him from his position of
seniority among the Qazaqs. Tursin Muhammad had been preparing for war for some
time, having threatened the Qalmaq with retaliation if they continued to attack the
traders of the khanate.*! Perhaps the fact that he was related both to the
Ashtarkhanids, his wife being an aunt of Imam Quli's, and to the Kashghariyan
ruling family, Apak Khan being his brother-in-law, had given him an undue sense of
his own importance. And the fact that his own son had recently been appointed
governor of Kashghar may have led him to covet a more exalted position for himself,
as independent ruler of the eastern regions. Iskandar Beg's explanation, that Imam
Quli marched to push back the Qazaqs because they had ‘taken Tashkent and those
boundaries, and stretched the hand of tyranny to the merchants of Samarqand’, seems
to confirm this theory. If Tursin Muhammad had tried to increase the territory allotted
to him as governor and had also attacked the merchants of the khanate, it is not
surprising that Imam Quli should have felt compelled to march in order to remove him

from his post.52
Before leaving Samarqand for Tashkent Imam Quli tried to establish relations with
the Mughals and also managed to give Khokhlov his first audience. Imam Quli's
relations with India had not developed since he had asked Khwajah Hashim to write
to Jahangir in 1615, but he must have been aware, and possibly concerned, that the
Emperor had been in touch with several religious figures in the khanate. In August
1620 the Jaibari khwajahs, who had contacts with the Naqshbandi shaikhs of India,
had sent an envoy to the Emperor. This envoy was not kept long in India. He was
sent back in September with a certain Mir Birkah, who had once worked in Bukhara
as a tutor in Taj al-Din Juibari's household, and who was now in Jahangir's service.
Mir Birkah brought them gifts from the Emperor worth 30,000 rupees. Six months
later, in February 1621,°3 Mir Birkah came again to the khanate on behalf of
Jahangir. This time he had been asked to give 5,000 rupees to a Khwajah Salih of
Deh Pidi near Samargand, and another 5,000 rupees to the custodians of Tamerlane's
tomb. He was also required to buy mottled walrus teeth for Jahangir ‘from any place
at any price’. It is not known how well Mir Birkah acquitted himself of the
commercial part of his mission, but the Emperor's goodwill towards the prominent
religious figures of the khanate was a source of some concern to Imam Quli. Was
Jahangir trying to gain influence in Ma wara’ al-nahr, or did his approaches simply
mean that he was ready to establish direct relations with the Bukharan Court? In any
case it was important for official contact to be made.
Before sending an ambassador to India, Imam Quli chose to test the Emperor's
response to such a move. He therefore persuaded his mother to send an envoy to

50 Khilkov, 421. Hajji Mir, 188a.
51 Materialy po istorii russko-mongol'skikh otnoshenii, 1, 104-5.

52 Mahmiid b. Wali (Ethé), 236b. Shah Mahmid, 65b-66b. Iskandar Beg, 963.
53 On 1 Isfandarmudh/20 February.

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Imam Quli
Jahangir's influential wife, Nur Jahan, with gifts and ‘expressions of goodwill and

friendship’. This envoy arrived in India after 21 April 1621 and shortly afterwards his
embassy was reciprocated. The ambassador chosen by Nur Jahan was none other
than one of the Emperor's oldest servants, Khwajah Nasir, who had served Jahangir
for over 16 years. This was taken as such a clear indication that the Emperor was
interested in establishing relations that Imam Quli no longer hesitated. He began to
plan his first official embassy to India.*4
Meanwhile Khokhlov had arrived in Samarqand in early February 1621 after
spending ten days in Bukhara. He was highly displeased with the way in which he
had been treated so far in the khanate. Although he had been given a generous daily
allowance in Bukhara (one whole sheep, 30 bread cakes, 10 1b of wheat and one load
of firewood) and although food had also been supplied for the journey to Samarqand,
his earlier request for carts, horses and food to be provided before his official
entrance into the capital had been ignored. Worse still, the governor of Bukhara,
Mirza Bik, had tried repeatedly to compel him to hand over the Tsar's message and
the four gerfalcons intended for the khan. Others too had attempted to take the

valuable birds from him. Adam Bik had done so first on the pretext that the gerfalcons
had been entrusted to him and not to Khokhlov. Later, a party of some 31 men led by
an official had turned up at the ambassador's lodgings, saying that Imam Quli had
given them verbal instructions to that effect. But Khokhlov was adamant: he would
not part with the gerfalcons until he saw the khan, and he resorted to his harquebus in
order to make his point. He must have been pleased when his courage and tenacity
finally bore fruit and he was at last summoned to visit Imam Quli in Samarqand.
However, here too, Khokhlov would have reason to be disappointed. First of all
he was not received in style. No horses were sent to bring him to the audience and
when he was taken by Adam Bik to meet the khan, he found that Imam Quli was in
the house of a trader, sitting on a plain wooden stool placed on a dais and surrounded
by only 40 courtiers. Secondly Khokhlov was shocked by the behaviour of the khan
and his officials during the initial stages of his audience. The audience began with an
usher trying to take the Tsar's letter from him, but the ambassador refused to let him
have his way, explaining that he would first greet the khan in his master's name, as
required by the Muscovite rules of etiquette. Imam Quli then failed to rise on hearing
Tsar Mikhail's name and Khokhlov had to make it clear that this was quite
unacceptable. Fortunately the remainder of the audience was more satisfactory, as the

khan did his best to make up for this initial faux pas. He began by explaining that in
his joy at receiving an ambassador from the Tsar after so many years, he had fallen
into a deep r€verie and had forgotten to rise. He then forbade the usher to handle the
Tsar's letter, which no doubt pleased Khokhlov who was able to give it to him with
due reverence and ceremony. Finally the khan promised to ‘do all the Tsar wanted’
and to have all the Muscovite slaves found and sent to Khokhlov. The ambassador
handed over the gerfalcons at this stage, together with his own offerings of 40 sable
pelts and a flagon of wine, and he was dismissed, the khan announcing that he would
be seeing him soon in Bukhara.
All this augured well for the remainder of Khokhlov's stay in the khanate, but
other unpleasant incidents occurred. To begin with, although he was told by Adam
Bik that he would receive a gift of 1,000 khanlyg (about 60 roubles) from the khan,
54 Aba ’Il-Muzaffar, 310, 325, 330. Nizamutdinov, Sredneaziatsko-indiiskie otnosheniya, 134.

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only 180 khanlyg were delivered, and he was assured that Imam Quli himself had

Sanctioned the reduction.>> Then the khan asked to examine his harquebusses and

kept one of them, worth 8 roubles, without making any attempt to pay for it. Straight
afterwards Khokhlov's food allowance was discontinued without explanation and he
was forced to keep himself, his suite and his horses, which meant that his nine

months' stay in the khanate eventually cost him a total of 44 roubles.56

When Khokhlov arrived back in Bukhara he was again disappointed, for the khan
did not follow him there as promised. Indeed it was several months before Imam Quli
was back in the capital. This was because his campaign against the Qazaqs had taken
much longer than anticipated and had been followed by a serious insurrection in
Samarqand. Before turning to these events it should be explained that the armies of
the khanate were busy on several fronts during 1621. Thus one or more expeditions
were launched to punish the Qalmaq for having attacked, robbed and even killed
Bukharan merchants as they travelled to Siberia and the Urals. Other troops were
engaged in defending the province of Balkh and in fighting the Qazaqs. Nothing is

known about the scale or success of the anti-Qalmaq expeditions,>” but we have a far
better idea of the action which occupied Nadir Muhammad and his amirs in the
province of Balkh. Mahmid b. Wali explains that in late 1030 (probably in early
1621) Rustam Muhammad returned to Khurasan where he settled in Ubeh. When
Nadir Muhammad was told about this in the spring of 1621, he at once set off
towards the southern part of the province of Balkh with about 200 men on the pretext
of hunting, hoping that his presence there would deter the pretender from attacking.
While he and his major amirs were apparently killing some ‘20,000 strange animals
of the desert called Biaban Mahmid’ a group of 2,000 men, which included Rustam
Muhammad's followers, Iranian mounted troops and disaffected tribesmen from the
khanate, marched to Maruchaq and Andkhud, causing much devastation, seizing
cattle and sheep, and killing all who offered resistance. Nadir Muhammad's stratagem
had clearly failed. He was now forced to send his men into action. They marched for
nearly 24 hours without making contact with the enemy and when they did so, they
found that they were outnumbered by ten to one. Nevertheless they ignored the
enemy's offer of negotiation and attacked. They fought fiercely for the greater part of
a day, defeated Rustam Muhammad's supporters, pursued them as they fled the
khanate, killed many and took many prisoners. But when they later discovered that
some of their fellow-tribesmen were among the prisoners they allowed them to go
free. Nadir Muhammad was so incensed that he punished the amirs by refusing to

receive them when they came to report on their success.*8
While Nadir Muhammad was engaged in the south his brother's army was
fighting the Qazaqs in the east. Two accounts of this campaign are available. Not
surprisingly the one by the Iranian historian Iskandar Beg is biased, as well as
uncharitable to both Imam Quli and his brother. The account by Khokhlov is rather
different and, since he was in the khanate at the time and had no particular axe to

55 Khani or tanga. See further about the value of the khanlyg in Davidovich, Istoriya, 96-97.

56 Khilkov, 398-401. Veselovskii, "Ivan", 68.

57 Bogoyavlenskii, Materialy, 62. R.I.B., II, 450-1. The Tyumen' officials who reported in 1621
that the armies of the khanate were fighting the Qalmaq had apparently obtained no detailed
information about the fighting or the locus belli.

58 Mahmid b. Wali (Ethé), 192a-4b.
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Imam Quli

grind against the ruler of the khanate, it is thought to be more reliable. However,
since Iskandar Beg's account is better known, it is worth reproducing it here for the
sake of comparison. Iskandar Beg says that Imam Quli himself led the expedition and
was seriously defeated. He lost some 20,000 men in the battle and many more during
a hasty and undignified retreat to Bukhara. He then wrote to his brother asking for
help, but Nadir Muhammad refused to send him an army, alleging that Rustam
Muhammad was near at hand and that it would be dangerous for him to leave the
province unprotected. Imam Quli was so angry on hearing his excuses that he
marched to Balkh with an army and compelled Nadir Muhammad to return with him,
bringing along the armies of Balkh and Hisar. Yalangtish Bi, who had also come
from Balkh, was then put in command. The combined armies of Bukhara and Balkh
were sent to Samargand, Imam Quli followed them and a second major battle was

fought with the Qazaqs. Once again, however, the Bukharan side was defeated with
heavy casualties. When Yalangtish's army scattered, Hashim Khwajah was called
upon to negotiate a truce, then all the combatants, including Imam Quli, left the area.
So much for Iskandar Beg's version of events. Khokhlov begins by saying that
the Bukharan army was led by the khan's uncle, Nadir diwanbegi, and not by Imam
Quli. He agrees that the initial Bukharan losses were enormous, but gives the
numbers of dead as 10,000 out of 40,000, which is in fact half the figure quoted by
Iskandar Beg. More to the point he states categorically that Imam Quli went on (to
Tashkent) after his uncle's débdcle and defeated the Qazags twice. Khokhlov does
not mention Khwajah Hashim nor the conclusion of a peace treaty, or truce, between
the defeated Bukharans and the Qazaqs. On the contrary, by the time he left the
khanate in late September the general consensus of opinion was, he said, that Imam
Quli would soon crush Tursin Muhammad completely because he was on the best of
terms with Nadir Muhammad who had come over to help, and there were now two of

them fighting a single Qazaq chief. As for Imam Quli's journey to Balkh in 1621, this
had not been undertaken with an army and with the intention of intimidating Nadir
Muhammad, as suggested by Iskandar Beg. He had fled there from a major
insurrection and this Khokhlov himself had witnessed in July 1621.
This seems to have been the sequence of events. The people of Tashkent, having
collaborated with the Qazaqs at some stage, were severely punished for doing so. A
major rebellion then broke out in Bukhara and Samarqand. According to Khokhlov
the people threatened to kill Imam Quli in protest at his ‘spilling Tashkenti blood for
nothing’.°? They actually attacked Nadir diwanbegi and the former governor of
Bukhara, Mirza Bik, wounding both men. Mirza Bik was particularly unpopular
because his men had behaved like highwaymen during his tenure of office, terrorising
the people of the capital, and they demanded his head. Imam Quli thought it best to
remove to Balkh. Mirza Bik did likewise, but did not escape revenge, for his enemies
followed him there and put him to death. Interestingly enough, when Imam Quli
returned to Samarqand in the company of Nadir Muhammad in late July 1621, he did
not dare to seek out and punish the rebels who had wanted to kill him, nor did he
bring Mirza Bik's assassins to justice, for he commanded far too little support in the
khanate. He would clearly need some significant military successes to regain his
people's support, but Khokhlov felt confident that the khan would soon overcome the

5? Iskandar Beg, 963. Khilkov, 422. The people of Samarqand were probably afraid that the khan's
action would result in reprisals against them in the future.

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Qazaqs' resistance.
Just before the rebellion mentioned above Imam Quli had agreed to give
Khokhlov a final audience, as the ambassador was anxious to bring his visit to a close
and leave for Muscovy. The new governor of Bukhara, Bokazazi (Baqi ‘Aziz), was
instructed by the khan to give Khokhlov food and transport for the journey from
Bukhara to Samarqand, but he ignored his orders and only provided Khokhlov with
food and an armed escort. The ambassador therefore had to travel ‘on his own horse’
and incur further unwelcome expense. When he arrived in Samargand he found, to
his dismay, that the khan was not there to receive him, for he had just fled to Balkh.
Khokhlov had to settle down and wait for him to return. He did so three weeks later
and at once gave Khokhlov the promised audience, a decision which the ambassador
would regard as showing due respect for him and his master. This audience,
however, was even more informal than the first one. The khan, who was ill in bed,

spoke to Khokhlov through his bedroom window. Contrary to his earlier promise he
now told Khokhlov that he would (only) let him have the slaves who were held at his

Court, together with those who had worked off their bondage. He also announced
that he was sending an ambassador and a letter to the Tsar.
Two days later Imam Quli sent Khokhlov a racehorse complete with saddle and
bridle, a silk turban, a silk and gold sash and a rich velvet caftan as parting-gifts. The
ambassador accepted the gifts with pleasure, but was obliged to reward the officials
who brought the gifts with a velvet caftan, an ox hide, a squirrel pelt and money, as
he had been told that they received no salary from the khan and only lived upon the
presents received. Imam Quli's administrative and financial mismanagement was
further demonstrated to the envoy some days later when he got only three-quarters of
the allowance of 4,000 khanlyq (240 roubles) which the khan had promised him to
cover his expenses and those of the released slaves whom he was to take to Muscovy.
When Khokhlov complained, he was told that 500 khanlyq had simply not been sent,
while another 500 had been earmarked by the khan himself as salary for the official

who had looked after him during his stay!®°
Imam Quli was in such financial difficulties that he seems to have lived by
expedients alone, a state of affairs which had probably led to the general dissaffection
of his subjects. Khokhlov noted that many preferred Nadir Muhammad and had gone
to live in Balkh. This was probably because, as revealed by Lahauri, the revenue of
Balkh had increased considerably under Nadir Muhammad's management, whereas
the income of the remainder of the khanate had constantly decreased under his
brother's rule. Imam Quli even had to hire his horses out to his subjects in order to

raise money! ©!
Khokhlov left Bukhara for his return journey on 24th September 1621. Several
weeks had gone by since his farewell audience of 7th August, mainly because he had
to wait for Adam Bik who was to accompany him to Muscovy.
Nevertheless Khokhlov was well satisfied with the result of his mission.
Although the khan had released no more than 35 of all the slaves held in the khanate,
it was clear that he could not risk releasing many more able-bodied men in view of his
forthcoming campaign against the Qazaqs and the recent casualties sustained. In any
case Khokhlov took back a double pledge from Imam Quli and from Nadir diwanbegi

60 Thid., 402-5.
61 Khilkov, 420. Lahauri, II, 542. Muhammad Yisuf Munshi, 250b.

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Imam Quli
that more slaves would be sent when the khan had ‘time to search for them’ and
when, ‘God willing, things would improve with the rebellious Turstin Sultan’. In the
meantime Khokhlov was permitted to ransom eight slaves himself, two of whom cost

him the princely sum of 78 roubles.§?
Khokhlov's return journey was even lengthier than his outward journey. He set
off for Urganj, but when he was half-way there he was told that ‘Arab Muhammad
had been toppled by his sons Habash and Ilbars and that Aba ’1-Ghazi and Sharif
Muhammad had fled to the khanate. ‘Arab Muhammad's eldest son Isfandiyar, then
36, was holding out against the usurpers, but he was under siege. This was certainly
no time for Khokhlov to travel to Khwarazm, so he went back to the khanate and
decided to return to Muscovy via Iran. While he was waiting for permission to travel
that way Abu ’l-Ghazi arrived in Samarqand where he was warmly welcomed by
Imam Quli, and the new rulers of Khwarazm wrote to Khokhlov. They pressed him
to come through as originally intended, saying that they did not want to antagonise the
Tsar and would cause him no harm. They also pointed out that the route through Iran

was far longer and far costlier.
Their arguments seemed convincing, so Khokhlov resumed his journey in early
November, in the company of Adam Bik, who apparently did not anticipate any
difficulties in Khwarazm, despite his master's welcome to Abt ’1-Ghazi who was
firmly on the side of his deposed father. And indeed it would appear that Adam Bik
had no particular problem during his stay, whereas Khokhlov was treated in the most
cavalier fashion. In Khiva he was made to pay transit dues, forced to visit Ilbars and
then detained for several months, Ilbars refusing to let him go until the usual caravan

of Khwarazmian merchants gathered for the autumn journey to Muscovy. When the
autumn caravan did not set off because of the cold, Khokhlov sought permission to
go alone overland to Astrakhan, but was told to wait for an ambassador whom Ilbars
was sending to Muscovy. In the meantime he was required to visit Habash at his seat
in Buvat and when he did so Habash's Customs officials took two horses, nine sheep
and a large quantity of their barley supplies from his party.64 When Khokhlov
protested he was told that the men were only acting on the Prince's orders and taking
part of their wages. The Customs officials then proceeded to slash open every one of
the party's bales in order to remove a percentage of their goods. They also took part
of their money, without making it clear whether these exactions were legitimate
Customs dues or a punishment inflicted upon Khokhlov because of his earlier protest.
Later Habash tried to have the party's harquebusses seized, and then a sabre was
taken by force from the ambassador's interpreter. Worse still he gave orders for 23 of
the slaves freed by Imam Quli to be taken from the party. When Khokhlov demanded
them back the Prince refused to let them go on the pretext that they had been Muslims
for many years and ought not to go and live in a Christian country. After this incident
the Muscovite ambassador was kept in Buvat several more months, during which

time Habash came near to putting him to death in retaliation for a recent Cossack raid
in which many Turkmen had been killed or taken prisoner, and also because of the
difficulties which his own ambassador was facing in Astrakhan. He was only
62 Khilkov, 405, 402, 441, 405, 412, 420. Veselovskii, "Ivan", 61, says that Imam Quli gave him

27 slaves. Materialy, 280-1.
63 Khilkov, 406-7. Aba ’l-Ghazi, tr. 291, 299, 307-8, 317-8, text 272, 277-8, 287, 296-7
64 Buvat has not been traced.

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dissuaded from doing so when warned by the ambassador whom Ilbars was sending
to Muscovy that the Tsar would probably retaliate himself by attacking and destroying
the whole of Habash's inheritance. Habash therefore permitted Khokhlov to leave in
late August 1622, but first he helped himself to a large quantity of the Bukharan

cottons which the party was taking to Muscovy.®

Khokhlov was at last on his way after an enforced stay of more than nine months
in Khwarazm. Crossing the Caspian, he reached Astrakhan on 3 October 1622,
bringing with him 31 freed slaves and an envoy each from Bukhara and from Khiva.
The Bukharan envoy was not Adam Bik, this ambassador having died during their
stay in Khwarazm. His successor was a religious dignitary called Aman Gildei (Kildi)

Abyz.°® A former member of Adam Bik's party, he had originally been sent by a
relative of Imam Quli's, Asan Azi (Hasan Khwajah Juibari), to congratulate the
.67 And although
Tsar's father, Patriarch Filaret, on his ‘release from the Lithuanians’
in fact the Tsar's father and co-ruler had been released by the Poles, not the
Lithuanians, in 1619, it is interesting to note that the Jaibari shaikhs were still eager to

play a part in the international arena. Unlike the rest of the party, Aman Gildei had
stayed in Khwarazm with his two manservants after Adam Bik's death. He was now
preparing to deliver the gifts which Imam Quli had entrusted to his predecessor, the
rich variety of which was intended to convey to the Tsar the khan's delight at the four
gerfalcons which Khokhlov had presented to him. The gifts included 2 valuable
racehorses, 5 camels, a large tent described as a sort of izba by Khokhlov, 5 steel

drums, of which 3 were inlaid with gold, a knife in a bejewelled case, and 9 pieces
each of velvet and damask, 9 being considered an auspicious number.
There were also presents for the Tsar from Ilbars and Habash for, despite their
general ill-treatment of Khokhlov, the Khwarazmian rulers hoped to gain the Tsar's

friendship. Ilbars had sent thirteen freed Muscovites and even Habash allowed five
Muscovite captives to return in the suite of his younger brother Afghan, aged 12,
whom he had decided to send to the Tsar's Court in order to save his life. He feared
that Ilbars, who had put their father to death, would undoubtedly deal with Afghan in
the same way.®8 Habash also hoped from help from the Tsar, for he had recently
fallen out with Ilbars. In fact, as Khokhlov would explain to the Tsar, the brothers

were at loggerheads with each other. Neither of them could expect any support from
the Shah, whom they had repeatedly attacked, nor from Imam Quli, for they had
twice set siege to Bukhara while he was on his way to fight the Qazaqs. Only the fact
that Imam Quli was still at war with the Qazags had prevented him from retaliating.
Such an attack would have had serious consequences for Khwarazm, for the khanate
was much more powerful, with nearly eight times as many towns and an army nearly
ten times as big, which Khokhlov estimated as 100,000 strong.
In his report Khokhlov made an informed survey of the khanate's foreign
relations. Although he does not appear to have known that Bukharan troops had
fought the Qalmaq somewhere to the east of Muscovite Siberia in 1621, he mentioned

65 Khilkov, 406-17.
66 For abyz meaning religious dignitary or mulla, see Kazakhsko-russkie

otnosheniya, glossary,

also Miller, I, 198.
67 TsGADA, fond 134, op.1, 1623 no.1, list 24-28. Hasan Khwajah was apparently Imam Quli's
zyat’, a Russian word which means either brother-in-law or son-in-law. He was also the son of
‘Abdallah's friend and mentor, Khwajah Sa‘d Jaibari. Lahauri, I, 544.
68 Khilkov, 418-20. Veselovskii, "Ivan", 61-62.

157

Imam Quli

that the Qalmaq had attacked Khwarazm in 1620 and 1621. He was optimistic about
the Qazaq war, but pessimistic about Bukharo-Mughal relations. He explained that
Nadir Muhammad had seriously compromised his brother's relations with Jahangir
by seizing the valuable gerfalcon which Imam Quli's first official ambassador to India
was taking to the Emperor. This had led Jahangir to arrest all the Bukharan merchants
then in India in retaliation and Nadir Muhammad was hoping to defuse the situation
with a letter of apology. Khokhlov also reported that Nadir Muhammad was on bad
terms with the Shah, although war had not broken out as yet because the Shah was
busy fighting India.6?
The situation which had developed between the khanate and Iran was indeed quite
serious, and was caused primarily by the activities of Rustam Muhammad Khan who
had recently attacked the khanate again. Hearing of Imam Quli's problems with the
Qazaqs he appears to have raided the southern part of the khanate at least twice before
the end of 1621. Iskandar Beg and Mahmid b. Wali give differing accounts of the
chronology of these events, which they place respectively in 1029 (December 1619 to
November

1620) and in 1032 (November 1622 to October 1623). However, both

historians agree that an army from the khanate retaliated by devastating the area
around Rustam Muhammad's stronghold of Ubeh, and that this was followed by
negotiations between the khanate and Iran which took place well before the Shah
began to prepare for his expedition to Qandahar. If Iskandar Beg is to be credited and
the envoys from the khanate were indeed dismissed some time before Shah “Abbas'
set off from Isfahan on 3 Rabi‘ II 1031 (15 February 1622), then the most likely date
for Rustam Muhammad's attacks and for the counter-attack that followed appears to
be 1030/1621. If Rustam Muhammad's first attacks took place straight after Nadir
Muhammad set off from Balkh to Samargand with the intention of fighting the
Qazaqs, they cannot have started before the end of July 1621, which is when the
brothers are known to have reached Samarqand.’”° And the counter-attack did not take
place before the autumn or winter months of 1621.
Iskandar Beg's version of Rustam Muhammad's first incursion into the khanate is
that he raided the outskirts of Andkhud and Shiburghan and caused serious damage.
The Prince, he adds, came with the help of Iranian troops and received support from
some two to three thousand Uzbegs, which is agreed by Mahmud b. Wali, although
he gives the names of the towns plundered as Jijektu and Maimana. As on a previous
occasion it seems that the Prince took advantage of a change of governor to attack, but
the citadel of Maimana held out and the raiding party left on hearing that an army
under the ataliq “Abd al-Rahman had been sent against them. The second attack on the
province, mentioned briefly only by Mahmud b. Wali and not by Iskandar Beg,
apparently resulted in a retaliatory expedition under Yalangtish Bi. The amir, together
with several officials and other amirs, and with local tribesmen such as the Hazarjat
who were used to fighting in mountainous terrain, was determined to teach Rustam
Muhammad a lesson.”! They marched to Ubeh despite severe snow and on hearing of
their approach Rustam Muhammad fled to the safety of Herat, leaving his followers to
defend the town. After two fierce battles, his followers tried to escape to Herat under
cover of darkness. Yalangtish set off in hot pursuit, and they tried to avoid capture

69 Khilkov, 422-4, 420-1.
70 This is known from Khokhlov's evidence. Khilkov, 402, 422.

71 Iskandar Beg, 961. Mahmiid b. Wali, 195a-8b.

158

1611-41

by fleeing eastwards instead. While they were making their way, first to the
mountains of Ghur, and then to Herat via Gharjistan, all of Rustam Muhammad's

numerous ‘possessions’, including large numbers of horses and camels, and even the
workshops which supplied his needs, were removed from Ubeh to the khanate.72
Later that same year the Bukharan amir, Qara Tughma, built a strong fort at
Chagcharan in Gharjistan, east of Ubeh, the idea being to stop any further incursions
by the pretender and also to persuade local people not to support him. When Shah
‘Abbas heard about the new fort, and was told that Yalangtiish also had a stronghold
nearby, which the amir was using as a base for his raids on Khurasan, he was highly
displeased. And he made up his mind that he would force them both to leave the
region during his forthcoming campaign against Qandahar.73
Shah “Abbas had always intended to retake Qandahar, which he had lost to India

in 1595. Although he had repudiated his amirs when they tried to take the town
shortly after Jahangir's accession in 1605-6,74 he now felt confident that he would
succeed, and a recent exchange of ambassadors with the Mughal Emperor did not
deter him from acting. Indeed the time seemed ripe for such an expedition, his
western frontiers being at last secure. The Ottoman danger was over, for the new
Sultan, Uthman II, wanted peace with Iran while he fought the European Firangis.
The Sultan had not only confirmed the peace of 1618, he had sent over friendly
embassies in 1620 and 1621. In the circumstances, and since Azerbaijan and Georgia
were now firmly under Iranian control, there was no reason why Shah ‘Abbas should
not be able to march to Qandahar. He therefore sent orders for a large army to gather
at Nishapur in preparation for the campaign, and spent the winter of 1621 in
Mazandaran. The fact that he did not go on pilgrimage to Mashhad as originally
intended gave rise to much speculation in Isfahan. The most likely theory, according
to Della Valle, was that he had been persuaded not to set foot in the province unless
he went there with an army and in readiness to punish the ‘Usbeghi’ (the people of
the khanate) for the many damaging raids that they had carried out on the province in
recent years.’> Whether or not this was the case, news that his army was gathering at
Nishapur soon reached the khanate, as he no doubt intended. It gave some concern to
the rulers of the khanate, who were making an all-out effort to reduce Tursun

Muhammad and his Qazaq supporters in the north-eastern regions of the khanate.
Was the Shah intending to march on Balkh and establish Rustam Muhammad there?
Nadir Muhammad hastened to send an ambassador to the Shah. The chihra aqasi
Payanda, who was received by the Shah in Isfahan in early 1622, was an able man,
eloquent and intelligent. He managed to convey to the Shah both Nadir Muhammad's

indignation at the number of attacks which had been carried out on the province of
Balkh by Rustam Muhammad, and also his wish to establish friendly relations with
the Shah, provided Rustam Muhammad were kept under control. The Shah, who did

not want the armies of Bukhara and Balkh to attack Khurasan during his expedition to
Qandahar, refused to take offence on being told that Nadir Muhammad would retaliate
if Rustam Muhammad was not disciplined. Instead he sent Payanda back with an
envoy of his own, Muhammad Salih Bik, who took a friendly message to the ruler of
72 Thid., 232a. In this passage the campaign against Ubeh appears to have been conducted by “Abd alRahman Ushun.

73 Iskandar Beg, 961.

74 Toid., 971.
75 Della Valle, Viaggi, I, 174.
15)

Imam Quli

Balkh. He then instructed the pretender to desist from attacking Balkh during the
Qandahar expedition and left Isfahan.
Once again Iskandar Beg attributes a major role to Nadir Muhammad's Iranian
mother in the negotiations which allegedly prevented an Iranian attack on Balkh, but
this is not confirmed elsewhere. According to this historian she wrote to the Shah
pleading for peace and it was her plea which persuaded Shah “Abbas to refrain from
avenging his honour and punishing the people of the khanate. Iskandar Beg also
writes that, in order to convince the Shah to keep the peace, Imam Quli used the good
offices of ‘Abd al-Rahim Juibari, this shaikh having established very good relations
with the Iranian monarch after falling ill in Isfahan on his way to Mecca. No mention
of ‘Abd al-Rahim's réle in this connection is made, however, in Mahmid b. Wali's
detailed account of the exchange of ambassadors which took place between the
khanate and Iran. It would seem therefore that if ‘Abd al-Rahim did make a plea for
peace, and he appears to have written to the Shah to this effect, he probably did so on
his own initiative. As for Imam Quli, as he had kept to the peace agreement of 1619,
he felt no need to enter into the negotiations. He let his brother deal with the matter,
confident that he would know how to establish Rustam Muhammad's responsibility

for starting the hostilities in the border area.7°

After agreeing to leave the khanate untouched during his forthcoming campaign
or, if we are to believe Iskandar Beg, after accepting Imam Quli's offer of friendship,
Shah ‘Abbas left Isfahan for Tabas Gileki in southern Khurasan on 3 Rabi‘II 1031/15
February 1622. He celebrated the New Year there in March, then went to Fara, and

on to Qandahar with his army. He arrived there on 20 May and at once began the
siege of the town. Although Jahangir had been warned that the Shah was on his way,
he failed to respond quickly enough. Reinforcements were sent to the town's small
garrison, but they arrived too late and Qandahar fell after a month's siege on 11
Sha‘ban/22 June. Shortly afterwards Zamindawar also fell to the Iranian forces. Shah
“Abbas was delighted with his success. He remained in Qandahar over a month,
repairing the town defences and holding court. He was particularly gracious to an
envoy from Jahangir's son Shah Jahan, who had rebelled against his father. He also
received an envoy from Isfandiyar of Khwarazm. This Prince, who had fled to Iran in
late 1621-early 1622 after trying, and failing, to hold out against his brothers Ilbars
and Habash, had found out that his brothers were fighting among themselves and that
Ilbars had put their father to death. The time seemed propitious for his return to
Khwarazm. Isfandiyar decided to make a bid for the throne. He wrote to ask for help
and Shah “Abbas ordered the Turkmen of the Astarabad region to support his efforts.
Having made his way back towards Khwarazm Ifandiyar wrote from Darun to his
brother Abu ’1-Ghazi inviting him to come and help. Abi ’1-Ghazi was eager to do so,
but he claims that Imam Quli refused to let him go, promising that he himself would
help him and his younger brother Sharif Muhammad to regain their patrimony when
the time was right. Although this decision was no doubt made with the very best of
intentions, because Imam Quli was unconvinced about Isfandiyar's chances of
SoReal "1-Ghazi would not forget that he had been kept in the khanate against
is will.
76 Mahmid b. Wali (Ethé), 199a-b. Iskandar Beg, 951, 957-8, 961, 962-4. Abi al-Qasim, Nuskha,

242a.
77 Iskandar Beg, 968-77. Abi ’1-Ghazi, tr. 317-8, text 296-7.
160

1611-41

Meanwhile Shah “Abbas named a governor for Qandahar, made sure that the
defences of the town had been properly repaired, and returned to Khurasan. But
although he was heading for Herat, he did not take the direct route via the lowlands.

He purposely marched through the mountains of Ghur, for he was determined to
settle acounts with Yalangtish and wanted to make it clear that he considered
Gharjistan as his own. A message of friendship received from the amir shortly after
leaving Qandahar did nothing to change his mind. Shah ‘Abbas marched due north
with his army, on the pretext that he had chosen this route as being pleasantly cool in
the heat of the summer. After passing through Chaqcharan, where his army probably
attacked Qara Tughma's new fort, he sent off a contingent of 40,000 men under

Khalaf Bik with instructions to reduce Yalangtish's mountain stronghold, and he
continued to Herat. On hearing of the Iranian army's approach Yalangtish apparently
abandoned his stronghold and left for Kabul, but in the event, because his fort was
very strongly built and well defended Khalaf Bik did not attempt to besiege it.
Instead, he took many of the local tribesmen prisoner and herded them, together with

their cattle, to Herat.78
Shah ‘Abbas, who had been in Herat since 17 August, was pleased when he
heard of Khalaf Bik's partial success. He felt confident that Yalangtish would no
longer dare, nor would he be able to attack Khurasan. He remained in the town over
two months, showing great favour towards Rustam Muhammad, to whom he gave a
rich estate.
During his stay in Herat he received an ambassador from Nadir Muhammad. This
was the first of many embassies in the year that followed the conquest of Qandahar, a
year during which the fort of Bala Murghab in Khurasan changed hands twice. These
embassies and the events centred round Bala Murghab have been presented, not only
with very different emphasis, but even in a different order by the various sources
consulted, but this seems to be what happened.’9
Nadir Muhammad sent to Herat the chihra aqasi Payanda,®° who had successfully
discharged a mission to the Shah some months earlier. He travelled with the returning
Iranian ambassador, Muhammad Salih Bik, and was expected to persuade Shah
‘Abbas that he must remove Rustam Muhammad from Khurasan altogether, this

Prince being entirely responsible for the strained relations which had developed
between the two countries
Shah ‘Abbas had no desire to invade the khanate again on behalf of a claimant to
the throne, as he had done so disastrously in 1602. He therefore decided to accept
Nadir Muhammad's offer of peace. He was gratified to hear that his envoy,
Muhammad Salih Bik, had been received both in Balkh and Bukhara. The fact that
Imam Quli and his brother were still at loggerheads with the Qazaqs, of which he was
probably aware, was an added guarantee of peace on the Khurasan frontier, as was
the lesson given to Yalangtish by Khalaf Bik.8! Shah ‘Abbas therefore decided to
agree with Nadir Muhammad's suggestion, and when he left Herat in mid-October for
78 Iskandar Beg, 978-9. Mirza Beg, 375b-6b. Della Valle, Viaggi, II, 460-1.
79 Generally Mahmid b. Wali's version of events has been followed.

80 Mahmid b. Wali, 199b. Iskandar Beg, 983, does not mention this second embassy by Payanda.
He calls this ambassador from the khanate Ibrahim Khwajah, and says he stayed in Iran until
Rustam Muhammad was pensioned off and the Iranian troops in Khurasan were disbanded.
81 Khilkov, 421-2. From Khokhlov's report it would seem that the Qazaq war had not ended when he
left Khwarazm in August 1622.

161

Imam Quli

Mazandaran, he took the pretender with him. However, as he left his whole army in
winter quarters in Khurasan and kept Nadir Muhammad's ambassador with him until
the following spring, Nadir Muhammad and his brother became worried about his
real intentions concerning Khurasan, and about their envoy's fate.
They decided to force the Shah to accept their initiative by a show of strength, and
in late 1622 or early 1623, while Shah ‘Abbas was in Mazandaran, they sent an army
under Uraz Bi to attack Badghis and the fort of Bala Murghab. The campaign was a
success. Bala Murghab was captured, most of its defenders were put to death, and a
number of prisoners were taken back to the khanate, most of whom, including the

former governor of Bala Murghab, belonged to the influential Shamli tribe.®?
Surprising though it might seem, the Shah made no attempt to retaliate. On the
contrary, in early spring he disbanded the army which had beenin Khurasan, and
after returning to Isfahan he pensioned off Rustam Muhammad in the presence of the
chihra aqgasi Payanda. Then, after giving the pretender a post of governor in Iran
proper, he dismissed Payanda and sent Muhammad Salih Bik to accompany him to
Balkh with gifts for Nadir Muhammad and also with a peace treaty, which was no
doubt dependent on the return of the town of Bala Murghab and its governor.
The reasons for Shah ‘Abbas's untypical reaction to the latest Bukharan attack
were complex. First it was clear by then that the Ashtarkhanid rulers of the khanate
and a majority of their subjects were determined to stop Rustam Muhammad from
gaining a foothold in the khanate. Secondly, in the early part of spring 1623 a Mughal
ambassador had arrived in Mazandaran with a very welcome letter from Jahangir. The
Emperor wrote that he valued the Shah's friendship above all other things, which
made it clear that he had decided to accept the loss of Qandahar. Shah ‘Abbas was
delighted with this letter, for although he wanted to retain Qandahar, it did not suit
him to march there again at that time because he was anxious to undertake a military
campaign in the west. There is no doubt that Shah ‘Abbas thought himself the righful
ruler of Qandahar, for the town had been promised and later given to Shah Tahmasp
by Jahangir's grandfather, Humayun, in return for his support. Shah ‘Abbas had
never recognised Akbar's annexation of 1595. He had made it clear, on more than
one occasion, that he expected the Mughals to return the town to him. After taking
Qandahar he had sent a message of warm friendship to the Emperor, explaining that
he had been forced to besiege the town only because the obdurate governor had
refused to hand it back as requested. And it was this explanation which enabled
Jahangir to accept the fait accompli, at least for the time being, without losing face.
Well satisfied with Jahangir's reply, Shah ‘Abbas decided that there was no need to
keep his army in Khurasan. The troops had certainly earned a few months' rest, and
he wanted them to be ready for action for his next campaign, when he intended to
wrest the prestigious town of Baghdad from the Ottomans.83
Shah ‘Abbas's plans concerning Baghdad were perhaps the most important
reason for his mild reaction to the loss of Bala Murghab. Baghdad had recently been
offered to him by an Ottoman official, and he knew that Turkey was in an upheaval,
following the murder of Uthman II and his replacement by the half-witted Mustafa,
whose first tenure of office had lasted only a few months, starting in November

82 Mahmid b. Wali (Ethé), 199b. Iskandar Beg, 961, 994, places the fall of this town both in the
Year of the Fowl 1030-1/1621-2 and in the following year.

83 Iskandar Beg, 994, 971-4, 992.

162

1611-41

1617. However, before he could consider such a major expedition, it was sensible to
make peace with the khanate.
When Muhammad Salih Bik reached the khanate in the spring of 1623, the Jaibari
shaikhs probably helped him, as did other major religious figures in the khanate, to
bring his mission to a successful conclusion. Peace terms were agreed and the Iranian
envoy was sent back to Isfahan with an envoy from Balkh, Khwajah Ibrahim, who
brought with him a promise that the Shah's conditions would be met. Shah ‘Abbas
showed his satisfaction by not detaining him. He dismissed Khwajah Ibrahim in the
autumn of 1623 and wrote to ‘Abd al-Rahim Khwajah Jaibari to inform him that he
had decided on peace in view of Nadir Muhammad's loving message, and in order to
(restore) tranquillity to his own people.*4 Then he left the capital for Mazandaran and

Baghdad, and by early 1624 he had taken the former capital of the Caliphs.85
Meanwhile the khans kept their promise. They returned Bala Murghab and its
governor to Iran, and the peace thus established betwen Ma wara’ al-nahr and Iran
continued unbroken until the death of Shah ‘Abbas in January 1629.86
In contrast, the situation with regard to Qandahar was not as straightforward as
the Shah might have wished. Although Jahangir had initially appeared resigned to its
loss, he had since decided to try and recover the town with the help of troops from the
khanate. Determined to develop relations with Imam Quli, he seems to have accepted
Nadir Muhammad's apologies concerning the stolen gerfalcon. He knew that he could
not rely upon his own son, for Shah Jahan had in fact made it easier for Shah ‘Abbas
to take Qandahar, first by dragging his feet when ordered to march and defend the
town against the Iranian army, and later by demanding territory and advancement
prior to taking action. Worse still, after the fall of the town the young man had at once
offered his friendship to Shah ‘Abbas, and since then he had taken up arms against
his father.
In 1622 Jahangir sent the ubiquitous Mir Birkah to the khanate again, this time
with a mission to Imam Quli and gifts for ‘Abd al-Rahim Khwajah Juibari. Mir
Birkah appears to have been successful in his mission. Indeed the Emperor wrote to
him late that year, praising his diplomatic skill and attributing to his influence, and
that of Khwajah Nasir, the feelings of ‘sincere friendship and filial devotion’ which
had marked a recent letter received from Imam Quli. Mir Birkah, he continued, must
now persuade Imam Quli to despatch a fully-fledged embassy to India, in return for
which Jahangir, 20 years his senior, would treat the khan as a son. The Emperor's
envoy was also urged to deliver the gifts sent to ‘Abd al-Rahim Khwajah, with whom
he had not yet made contact, the khwajah having presumably stayed in Balkh after his
return from Isfahan. Finally Jahangir, who wanted to find out more about events in

the khanate, asked Mir Birkah to return to India as soon as possible.87
In the spring of 1623 the Emperor at last received an official embassy from Imam
Quli. He was delighted and hastened to respond, sending Mir Birkah to accompany
84 Mahmiad b. Wali (Ethé), 199b. Iskandar Beg, 994-1003. Abi ’1-Qasim, Nuskha, 242a. Riazul
Islam, A calendar, Il, 231, says the Shah wrote to ‘Abd al-Rahim's brother.

85 Iskandar Beg, 1003, places the fall of Baghdad on 23 Rabi'l 1033/14 January 1624. Hammer,
Histoire, 1X, 19, places it earlier, in November 1623.

86 Mahmid b. Wali (Ethé), 199b. Iskandar Beg, 994.
87 CHI, IV, 170-1. Aba ’1-Muzaffar, 345 and ff. Anon. Maktubat, Ethé 2068, 321a-2a. Riazul
Islam, A calendar, Il, 234-5, places Jahangir's letter in or soon after December 1622.

163

Imam Quli

the Bukharan ambassador back to the khanate. The ambassador, whose name was
Uzbeg Khwajah, had brought a secret message which appears to have suggested a
joint campaign against Iran. But although it suited Jahangir to agree to any such plan,
he was reluctant to do so, either because he had taken a dislike to Uzbeg Khwajah and
was unsure about the validity of his message, or because the plan would have meant
an enormous outlay for the Mughals in men and materials. In any case, this was only
the first time that the plan had been mentioned, and Imam Quli's goodwill towards
India had not yet been tested. Jahangir therefore wrote to Imam Quli, asking him to
confirm that the message was true and to give fuller details of his plan to Mir Birkah
who was fully in his confidence. Mir Birkah should then be sent back with another
ambassador from the khanate, who might be Uzbeg Khwajah, if he was indeed in the
khan's confidence, as stated in Imam Quli's letter. Jahangir also expressed the hope
that the obstacles to their friendship had been removed forever, and declared his
pleasure on hearing about Imam Quli's recent success against the “Qizilbash rabble’.
For his part he had always upheld the Sunni principles inherited from the first
Caliphs, showing favour to Sunnis and hostility to such ‘counterfeiters’ as the Shi‘a.
It was the duty of all Muslims to safeguard the religion and remove this sort of
scourge from the earth, he added, and he hoped that Imam Quli would join him in this
task.
Uzbeg Khwajah was accordingly sent back with Mir Birkah, but by the time the
two ambassadors reached the khanate Imam Quli had signed the peace treaty with
Shah ‘Abbas. He was therefore unable to continue with the intended campaign against
Iran. He wrote to Jahangir to explain the situation, and waited a few years before

sending another major embassy to India.88
By late 1623 Imam Quli was thus on good terms with Iran and India. He was also
optimistic about Khwarazm, but Muscovy, the Qalmaq and the Qazagqs were distinctly
unfriendly. In the summer of 1623 Isfandiyar had managed, at his second attempt, to

take the country over from Habash and Ilbars who had been put to death.89 Once he
was securely established on the throne he sent to Bukhara for his brothers Abu ’1Ghazi and Sharif Muhammad, and this time Imam Quli promptly complied with his

request, for he was satisfied that Isfandiyar was fully in control.9° In return for his
prompt response and for having extended his hospitality to Isfandiyar's brothers he
must have felt confident that a friendly rapport would henceforth exist between their
88 Hajji Mir, 189b-92b. The exact date of Uzbeg Khwajah's dismissal is not known, but this may
have taken place in 1623, as Jahangir was anxious to take up Imam Quli's offer. Riazul Islam,
Indo-Persian relations, 89, says he left in October 1625, but this is not confirmed by the
references given.
89 Materialy, 302-3. At least one of them was dead by February 1624. Conflicting reports about
their fate were submitted to the voevody of Astrakhan by a Noghay manservant and by Muscovite
traders. Habash was said to be either dead or living in Turkestan with the Qazaqs, and Ilbars was

reported as having been killed at Khiva, or else under siege at Hazarasp. According to Al-Mu’ nis
(449-50) Ilbars was killed initially and Habash fled for refuge to the Noghays. But they handed
him over to Isfandiyar and he was executed.

90 Materialy, 302. The young Princes were apparently in Urganj with Isfandiyar by February 1624.
Abu ’1-Ghazi (tr. 318-9, text 297-8) says Isfandiyar returned to Khwarazm in the Year of the Pig

(March 1623-March 1624), two years after his first attempt to return there, but this is not strictly
correct, for Isfandiyar made his first attempt after the fall of Qandahar in the summer of 1622 and
was back before February 1624. Abii ’1-Ghazi seems to have merely based himself on the fact that

Isfandiyar's returned in A.H. 1031 (after 16 November 1621) the first time and in A.H. 1033 (after
25 October 1623) the second.

164

1611-41
two countries.
With Muscovy on the other hand, the situation was distinctly unsatisfactory. The
Tsar had taken offence at the cavalier treatment received by Khokhlov in the khanate,
although it would appear that ignorance of Muscovite expectations, rather than a

desire to offend, had caused many of the incidents which the ambassador reported.
Partly in order to show his resentment, and partly because he thought it ‘unseemly’ to
receive an envoy sent by a mere dignitary and not by the ruler of the country, Tsar
Mikhail detained Hasan Khwajah's envoy Aman Gildei some two to three years in
Yaroslavl’, together with the envoys of Ilbars and Habash. Some distinction,
however, was quite properly made between Aman Gildei and the Khwarazmians,
because the Bukharan ruler had merely been a poor host, whereas the Khwarazmian
Princes had purposely made difficulties to Khokhlov. In any case some appreciation
had to be shown of Aman Gildei's claim that he had spent a lot of his own money to
expedite Khokhlov's departure from Khwarazm. As a result it was decided that the
Bukharan should receive ‘the usual’ allowance granted to an official envoy from his
country, this being higher than the allowance granted to the envoy of Khokhlov's
chief persecutor, Habash. Then in 1625 Aman Gildei was received by the Tsar,
together with the Khwarazmian envoys.9!
Tsar Mikhail also vented his anger on another envoy from Imam Quli who arrived
in Tyumen' on 3 November 1622. This envoy, known in Russian documents as
Chobak Balykov (Chibak Baligh), was probably despatched overland to Siberia
when Imam Quli heard of Adam Bik's death in Khwarazm and of the difficulties
which Khokhlov was experiencing there. Chobak Balykov had hoped to continue to
Moscow via Tobol'sk and also to acquire a number of gerfalcons for Imam Quli. But
he was not allowed to go beyond Tobol'sk and he was told most emphatically that the
gerfalcons of Siberia were reserved solely for Tsar Mikhail's pleasure or for him to
dispense, as a token of his affection, to the rulers he loved. The envoy was left in no

doubt that the Tsar had taken exception to the length of Khokhlov's stay in the
khanate, as well as the losses which he had suffered at the hands of overbearing
officials, and the fact that he was sent back without an accompanying ambassador
from the khan. Imam Quli's attempt at sending Adam Bik with Khokhlov would
appear to have been forgotten, as were the gifts which were sent with him and
delivered by Aman Gildei.%2
Chobak Balykov was sent back in about June 1623, having accomplished only
that part of his mission which involved finding out the latest news about Imam Quli's
enemies, the Qalmaq. The Qalmaq were apparently still at war with the overall ruler of
the eastern Mongols or western Khalkhas, known as the Altan Khan. The campinggrounds of the Altan Khan and eastern Mongols were centred round lake Upsa Nor
and the Yenisei, on the route between Muscovite Siberia and China. Like Imam Quli
they had been fighting the Qalmaq since 1621, and the khan must have been pleased
to hear that they had recently defeated the Sungar Qalmaq Kharakhula.® On the other
hand, he must have been disappointed to hear of Tsar Mikhail's unfriendly attitude,
and consequently made no further effort to keep in contact with the Tsar. Muscovy

91 TsGADA, fond 134, op.1, 1623 no.1, listy 8, 11-12, 18, 25-28, 52, 121. Veselovskii, "Ivan",
71, says both Khwarazmian envoys received a reduced allowance, but this is not confirmed by the
evidence available.

92 Miller, II, 287-9, 304. Materialy, 137-8.
93 Miller, II, 93, 304, 301-2.
165

Imam Quli

was practically forgotten in the khanate for the next ten years, but not by Nadir
Muhammad who, conscious of the value of trade, sent an agent to Muscovy about a
year later with a sizeable consignment of goods.”4
The khanate was at peace in the summer and autumn of 1623, except for sporadic
fighting with the Qalmagq, but that winter Tursun Muhammad Sultan rebelled again in
the area of Tashkent. Imam Quli responded energetically. He ordered his uncle, Nadir
diwanbegi Tughii, to set off from Bukhara and also asked for armies from Balkh and
Andijan to be sent to the troubled area. An enormous army of 160,000 men was
accordingly put together in Balkh and Bukhara, but it was so unwieldy that it took all
of six months to reach the Syr-Darya. This delay enabled the Qazaq side to gain in
strength and to march on Shahrukhiya. The khan's army, reinforced by a detachment
under Abili Sultan of Andijan, engaged them in battle outside the town, but, despite
their superior numbers, they were badly defeated and, owing to disorganisation and
lack of co-ordination, more than half the men perished.
When Imam Quli was told of the disaster he marchéd at once to Shahrukhiya. He
was accompanied by his spiritual director, Khwajah Hashim, who hoped to negotiate
a settlement. Tursin Sultan's nominee, Murad Sultan, strengthened the walls of
Shahrukhiya in preparation for a siege and then appealed to the Qazaq Prince for help.
But Tursin Sultan balked at the idea of fighting his suzerain on the battlefield. He
decided to negotiate, approached Khwajah Hashim and it was agreed that Imam Quli
would go to Tashkent to receive his full submission.9> When the khan got to
Tashkent some time in the spring of 1624 Tursin Sultan not only submitted, but also
promised to pay the usual taxes to the Treasury. Satisfied with the outcome of the
campaign, Imam Quli then disbanded his army and returned to Bukhara. Shortly
afterwards he went to visit Nadir Muhammad in Balkh and was no doubt very
gratified by his brother's deference and warm welcome. Nadir Muhammad went
several miles out of the town to meet him, and even insisted on walking the last two
miles into Balkh alongside Imam Quli's horse, a traditional token of respect.9®
The younger khan not only wished to show that he held his brother in high
esteem. He wanted to try and convince Imam Quli that he would behave impeccably
in the future. He also hoped to be forgiven for his involvement in an incident which
nearly put an end to Imam Quli's hopes for friendly relations with India. Some time in
1623 the amir and landowner Yalangtish Bi had extended his holdings east of
Gharjistan by building a fort at Chutur near Ghazni, from which tax-collectors could
go out to exact tribute from the local Hazara tribesmen. When he returned to the
khanate after leaving his nephew in charge of Chutur, the tribesmen appealed to the
Mughal governor of Kabul to help rid them of their new overlord. And Khana Zad
Khan sent a detachment which defeated the Bukharan garrison, killed Yalangtish's
nephew and razed the fort to the ground. Yalangtish then pleaded with Nadir
Muhammad to give him troops so that he could avenge his nephew, and although
Nadir Muhammad

was reluctant to get involved, he finally let him have 10,000

soldiers. Yalangtush took them to Chutur, together with irregulars (Alman). They
arrived there in early June 1624 and according to the Mughal historians who alone
94 Materialy, 152-3, 181. See further about this agent in chapter 12 below.
5 This may be the settlement that Iskandar Beg (963) was referring to, but he placed it at a different

time (about three years earlier) and in rather different circumstances

96 Mahmiid b. Wali (Ethé), 106b-8a.

166

1611-41

report the incident, they were crushed after a battle in which the Mughal troops made
full use of bows and arrows, cannons, muskets and war elephants.
When Yalangtush returned to the khanate, having lost at least 300 men, plus

1,000 horses and large quantities of weapons, Nadir Muhammad thought it politic to
write to Jahangir disclaiming any responsibility for the incident. He certainly did not
want the Emperor to attack the khanate in reprisal, and Jahangir pretended to believe
Nadir Muhammad's protestations. As Yalangtish had been totally defeated he could
afford to be magnanimous. In any case, although he was delighted with his soldiers’
success and rewarded every one of them, he still hoped to retake Qandahar and it did
not suit him to fall out with Imam Quli. He was relying on the khan's help against
Shah “Abbas, whose power and prestige had grown immeasurably as a result of his
capture of Baghdad. That explains why the Emperor even removed Khana Zad as
governor of Kabul and replaced him with a certain Zafar Khan, in order to please

Nadir Muhammad.” Less than 16 months later, however, Yalangtish's ambition and
aggressiveness would cause new difficulties for Nadir Muhammad and force him to
write once again to the Emperor disclaiming responsibility for the amir's actions.
In the meantime very cordial relations were maintained between the khanate and
Iran. In 1624 an Iranian ambassador, Kamal al-Din, visited Balkh, returning to Iran
that autumn with an ambassador from Nadir Muhammad,

whom

the Shah later

referred to as Mirza Nadir diwanbegi. Although they arrived in Isfahan after the
Shah's departure for Mazandaran, the Balkh envoy was royally entertained in the
capital. He was equally well treated when he joined Shah ‘Abbas in his winter
quarters in Mazandaran. He delivered gifts and a letter in which Nadir Muhammad
asked for a number of piebald horses, and when he was dismissed two months later
he took back a very friendly answer from Shah ‘Abbas, explaining that he had only
found one which was good enough to ride, all the others being too old and worn. He
was sending Nadir Muhammad this black piebald which was his own and very
reliable, together with a swift horse, and would despatch more piebalds if and when
suitable ones were found. In addition, because he knew of Nadir Muhammad's love
of hunting, he had decided to send him a gerfalcon and a falcon, both recently
confiscated from the Muscovite ambassador who was taking them to Istanbul. Shah
‘Abbas closed by expressing the hope that their friendship would develop and that
Nadir Muhammad would appeal to him if he needed any major task undertaking in the
area of Balkh, a rather strange message, since Nadir Muhammad should have
normally turned to his own brother for help and support. Was Shah ‘Abbas trying to
drive a wedge between Nadir Muhammad and his brother? And did he hope that the

gift of hunting-birds intended for the Sultan would put an obstacle in the way of the
traditional Bukharo-Ottoman alliance? If so, he would be disappointed in his
expectations.%8
While Nadir Muhammad's envoy was in Iran, there was more trouble in
Khwarazm. Isfandiyar and his brothers fell out, and the people of Khwarazm took
sides, splitting along tribal lines. The Turkmen supported Isfandiyar, and the local
Uzbegs sided with Abi ’1-Ghazi and Sharif Muhammad. In September-October 1624
the majority of the Uzbegs left the country, some going with Sharif Muhammad to
97 Aba ’1-Muzaffar, 386-8, 393. Kamgar Husaini, 194a-5b, 200b. Mu‘tamad Khan, 225-8, says the
Uzbegs lost 600 men.

98 Aba ’1-Qasim, Nuskha, 241b. Iskandar, 1015.
167

Imam Quli

Bukhara, others to the Noghays. As for Aba ’1-Ghazi and his supporters, they went
to Turkestan to seek refuge with the Qazaq Ishim Sultan. Abi ’]-Ghazi's decision
may have disappointed Imam Quli, but he cannot have taken it as a demonstration of
ill-will, for he himself had been on good terms with Ishim Sultan since his marriage
to the Qazaq Prince's daughter in 1620. Since then Ishim had been busy fighting the
Qalmaq, but his rival for supremacy over the Qazaqs, Tursin Sultan, had fought
several battles with Imam Quli. Although an agreement between them had been
reached in the spring of 1624, as mentioned above, Imam Quli did not fully trust
Tursin Sultan. He was in fact anxious to remove him as ruler of Tashkent. However,
Ishim Sultan does not appear to have known this and perhaps because Imam Quli's
agreement with his rival had dashed his hopes of ruling Tashkent while causing him
to lose confidence in Imam Quli's effectiveness as a ruler, during the winter of 1624

he made peace with Tursiin Sultan.
From then on the two Qazaq Princes were on such good terms terms with each
other that Tursiin Sultan even visited Ishim in Turkestan. While he was there he was
introduced to Abi ’1-Ghazi and, on Ishim's suggestion, the ‘khan of the Qazaqs’
invited the young man to return with him in Tashkent. Abu ’]-Ghazi did not hesitate to
go and live under the protection of Imam Quli's enemy. He did not feel any obligation

towards the ruler of Bukhara. On the contrary, he still remembered with anger the
Bukharan ruler's refusal to let him return to Khwarazm in 1622. Although Imam Quli
had rightly assessed the situation at the time as dangerous, and Isfandiyar's chances
of overthrowing Habash and Ilbars as minimal, Aba ’1-Ghazi still nursed a grievance
against him and against the khanate.100
But to return to the situation in late 1624. Shortly after Abu ’1-Ghazi went to join
Tursiin Sultan in Tashkent, Ishim gave up his alliance with the Altan Khan whom he

had so far supported against Turstn Sultan and the Qalmaq. This was not surprising
since Ishim had become reconciled to Tursiin but it must have come as a shock to
Imam Quli who had been trying to conclude a tripartite defensive and offensive

agreement with the Altan Khan and Ishim.!°! At the same time Ishim made peace
with the Qalmaq, and his negotiations could not have been more timely. As it
happened, the chief of the Derbet tribe, Dalai, who was camping uncomfortably near
to him, about three weeks away from Bukhara on the route to Tobol'sk, had been
planning to attack Ishim's settlements that winter.!°2 But he was forestalled. During
the winter of 1624 ambassadors from both Tursiin and Ishim arrived at Dalai's
encampment in order to ‘talk of peace’. They were seen there by a Siberian official
from Tobol'sk who was told that Tursin had lively trade links with Russia and
Siberia, and that Imam Quli was fighting a major war ‘about the cities’ (of the

khanate),!©3 possibly a reference to the battles then taking place between the Qazaq
99 Abii ’1-Ghazi, tr. 328, text 306. Materialy po istorii russko-mongol'skikh otnoshenii, I, 136.

100 Aba ’1-Ghazi, tr. 328-9, text 306.

101 TsGADA, fond 214, op.1, kn.6, listy 94b-95b. A Siberian Bukharan who had returned from a
visit to the Qalmaq in early October 1624 reported in Tobol'sk that the Mongols had come to
some arrangement with the Qazags (i.e. Ishim) and that Imam Quli had written to the Mongols
asking them to ‘stand as one with him against the ruler of Savran Tursin and against the

Qalmaq’. See Bogoyavlenskii, Materialy, 60-64, for relations between the Altan Khan, the
Qalmaq, Qazaqs and the khanate from 1620.
102 Materialy po istorii russko-mongol'skikh otnoshenii, I, 140.

103 Thid., I, 140.

168

1611-41

and Bukharan armies near Andijan.
The Qazaqs' campaign had been initiated by Tursiin Sultan, who resented being a
vassal to Imam Quli, although he had accepted this status after the last campaign.
Ishim had been asked to help, and he did so in order to show support for Tursin and
probably out of deference for the younger man's known military superiority. They
marched on Andijan with the intention of punishing the Qazaq governor, Abili
Sultan, for having sided with Imam Quli the previous year. Their decision came as a
blow to Imam Quli, who had rather hoped for a spell of peace on his eastern frontiers.
He hastily gathered an army which was sent to help Abiuli Sultan and wrote to his
brother to ask for more troops. When the combined armies of Bukhara and Balkh
arrived near Namangan, which was then under siege, the Qazaqs did not hesitate.
Raising the siege, they engaged them in battle, forced them to retreat and set off in hot
pursuit. The Balkh contingent rallied and tried to fight back, losing many of its
leaders, but the remainder of the khan's army retired to the nearby fort of Tisi. There
they held out, repelling a Qazaq attack with great vigour. They even made a
successful sortie and the Qazaqs fled, leaving behind women and children, prisoners
and booty. Two months later the Qazaq Princes came back to the attack. They
attempted to take the fort of Sang, but after failing to do so, they gave up their

expedition altogether and returned to Turkestan and Tashkent.105
There was no more trouble in the eastern provinces of the khanate for the next two
years, perhaps because Imam Quli made no attempt to remove either Ishim Sultan
from Turkestan or Turstn Sultan from Tashkent. However, a new incident took place
in the frontier region with India, for which once again Yalangtiish Bi was
responsible. Yalangtish was apparently determined to hold sway over the entire
frontier region which ‘Abdallah had designated as being within the khanate's sphere
of influence. This was not so much for personal gain but in order to protect the
khanate with a buffer-zone, the inhabitants of which would either recognise the
khan's sovereignty, or remain fiercely independent of the Mughal Empire, thus
thwarting any plans which the Emperors might have for invading the khanate.
On this occasion Yalangtish encouraged a well-known Afghan rebel, Ahdad Bad
Nahad, to attack the mountainous area south of Jalalabad known as Tirah, promising
to attack Ghaznin (Ghazni) at the same time. Ahdad Bad Nahad, who had been
causing trouble for the governors of Kabul since 1611, was only too pleased to
oblige, but Yalangtush proved unable to create havoc around Ghaznin, as planned,
for as soon as the governor of Kabul, Zafar Khan, heard of his arrival, he gathered a

large army and prepared to march against him. Yalangtish, who was not ready for a
major armed conflict, had to leave the area and abandon his ally, and he did so after
sending a message of apology to Zafar Khan. Zafar Khan then led his army against
Ahdad Bad Nahad. The rebel fled for refuge to a mountain fort in Naghr. He held out
for 50 days, but after the fort was taken in February 1626 he was captured and put to

death. Once again Nadir Muhammad tried to dissociate himself from Yalangtush's
action. He wrote a friendly letter to the Emperor which he sent off, with gifts worth
50,000 rupees. And once again his peace-offering was graciously accepted,
Yalangtish having totally failed in his undertaking. Jahangir was especially pleased
with the horse, the gerfalcon and the Turkish slave delivered to him by Nadir
Muhammad's ambassador, Shah Khwajah. As a gesture of goodwill he did not detain
105 Mahmid b. Wali (Ethé), 108b-110a. Tasi and Sang have not been traced.
169

Imam Quli

the envoy for very long. Just over seven months later Shah Khwajah was on his way
back to Balkh, having received from the Emperor a generous reward of 40,000

rupees.
105
Meanwhile there had been more upheavals in Istanbul, where Mustafa I had been
toppled in September 1623 and replaced by a boy of 12, Murad IV. When Baghdad
was lost to Iran shortly after his accession, the Sultan's advisers decided to renew
their links with the khanate and to organize a combined attack on Iran. They wrote to
Imam Quli in 1624, and again in 1625. The second letter was entrusted to a man from
the khanate, Ay (‘Ali?) Muhammad Sultan, who had lived eight years in captivity in
Iran, and had fled to the Ottomans during the siege of Baghdad. But Ay Muhammad
took a very long time to deliver this letter, because he travelled to the khanate via
Egypt, Mecca and even India, where had been asked to hand a similar request for help
to Jahangir. The letter which he took to Imam Quli is unlikely to have reached
Bukhara before 1627, by which time the Ottomans had tried and failed to retake

Baghdad, leaving the area in early July 1626 after an unsuccessful eight month siege
of the town.
Although Imam Quli cannot have heard from Ay Muhammad before 1627, he
probably received the Ottomans' first letter in-1625 or 1626 and was no doubt
sympathetic to their request. Nevertheless he allowed, or even encouraged his brother
to send an ambassador to Iran, and this ambassador was in Qazwin in September
1626 when Shah ‘Abbas returned there from Baghdad. His aim was to propitiate the
Shah, in case the Iranian ruler might have considered attacking the khanate in the
aftermath of his victorious campaign to Baghdad. At the same time, however, Imam
Quli despatched a major embassy to Jahangir, with a letter in which he called for a
joint attack on Iran. He began by mentioning the treaty signed by ‘Abdallah and
Akbar, saying that it sanctioned the partition of Iran and Khurasan between their
countries. He went on to explain that he considered it his duty to fight Iran, for family
reasons, in order to avenge his father, Din Muhammad, and for religious reasons, in
order to open the route to the Holy Places. He concluded with a reference to Shah
Jahan who had rebelled again in 1626 after a lull in 1625. He attempted to comfort the
Emperor by saying that it was but normal for young people to rebel, and that the best
cure for this was to send the Prince to fight his father's enemies and clear the route to
the Holy Places.
This letter was taken to Jahangir by no less a personage than ‘Abd al-Rahim
Khwajah Juibari, whose illustrious ancestry was said to include two major Islamic
figures - the fourth Caliph, ‘Ali, and the sixth Imam, Imam Rida - as well as Genghis

Khan, and who had allegedly negotiated some years earlier with the Shah.!06 He was
bound to make a better impression on Jahangir than his predecessor, Uzbeg
Khwajah, whose words had been received with such scepticism three years earlier.
And Mir Birkah, who accompanied him to India as requested by the Emperor, would

no doubt vouch for him.!°7 Both men were given rich presents to deliver to the
Emperor. According to a Dutch observer Mir Birkah brought over more than 2,000

105 Aba ’l-Muzaffar , 96, 129, 153, 400, 407, 413. Mu‘tamad Khan, 249-51, 266.
106 Akhmedov, "Rol", 18, says the Juibari shaikhs descended, not from Genghis Khan, but from the
commander-in-chief of the Timurid armies of Herat. See above for Iskandar Beg's suggestion that
the khwajah, together with Nadir Muhammad's mother, had interceded with the Shah and persuaded
him not to march on the khanate in 1622.

107 Tt is not known whether Mir Birkah had been back to India since 1623.

170

1611-4]
magnificent

horses and

1,000 dromedaries,

apart from

‘Bolgari’

(i.e. Kazan’)

perfumed hides and other valuables. As for ‘Abd al-Rahim, he presented Jahangir and
Nor Jahan with an inlaid cup and saucer said to be worth 100,000 rupees and full of
perfume, together with 500 dromedaries ‘of exceptional beauty’, 1,000 horses,
carpets and ‘much porcelain of curious workmanship’. According to Nizamutdinov
there were also walrus tusks, sables, a spinel of unusual size and great value, and a
number of precious manuscripts among his gifts.!
Jahangir was delighted to receive an ambassador of such standing. He knew all
about ‘Abd al-Rahim and had in fact sent him presents through Mir Birkah in the past.
Comparing him somewhat undiplomatically with Nadir Muhammad's last
ambassador, Shah Khwajah, he told the Samargand poet Mutribi that ‘Abd al-Rahim
was worth 100 times as much.!!° In order to show his pleasure he had the khwajah
warmly welcomed at every stage of his trip to Lahore, and even sent an official three
stages out of the capital to meet him.
“Abd al-Rahim was then granted an audience as soon as he arrived in Lahore, at
some time between November 1626 and March 1627, during which he was excused
from both the prostration (kurnish) and the obeisance (taslim), and he was even
made to sit throughout. The following day the ambassador was doubly honoured: he
received food from the Emperor's own table and was given several gold and silver
dishes or vases. A gift of 30,000 rupees and a silver litter (haudah) for use on an
elephant followed, and he was invited to dine with the Emperor regularly, on which
occasions he was placed at table higher than the Crown Princes themselves. Jahangir
also consulted him on matters of state and when the ailing Emperor travelled to
Kashmir in the spring of 1627 in the hope of benefiting from a change of air, he took

the khwajah with him as a matter of course.!!!
However, although Jahangir must have been pleased with the message entrusted
to ‘Abd al-Rahim, he was not in a position to take up Imam Quli's suggestion. Not
only was he seriously ill, but he was no longer in control of the country. He had even
been kidnapped for a while by a major official, Mahabat Khan. And his sons were
either unable, or unwilling to help him. Parwiz had died of drink in October 1626,
Shahriyar was ill, and Shah Jahan, who had formed an alliance with Mahabat Khan,
was determined to oust him from power. In the event Jahangir's health was to
deteriorate further while in Kashmir and he died in November 1627 without

answering Imam Quli's embassy.!!2.
While ‘Abd al-Rahim was in India major developments were taking place in the
eastern provinces of the khanate. Sometime during 1036/November 1626-November
1627 the alliance between the Qazaq leaders Ishim and Tursiin came to an end. The
split appears to have occurred as a result of Ishim Sultan's decision to go and fight the
Qalmag in Kashghariya. He set off without consulting Tursuin Sultan about the
matter, taking with him his own followers and some warriors from Tursin Sultan's
tribe. Not surprisingly Tursiin was highly incensed. Determined to punish Ishim
Sultan, and also perhaps to cause a diversion for the benefit of his relative Apak
109 De Laet, 87. Nizamutdinov, Sredneaziatsko-indiiskie otnosheniya, 84-85.

110 Abdul-Ghani, Khdtirat, 45, 48.

111 De Laet, 86-87. Kamgar Husaini, 219a-21a. Abi ’1-Muzaffar, 416. Mu'tamad Khan, 286, 290.
Nizamutdinov, Sredneaziatsko-indiiskie otnosheniya, 84-86.

112 CHI, IV, 175-8.
171

Imam Quli

Khan, ruler of Kashghariya,!!3 he attacked Turkestan and carried off Ishim Sultan's

wife and children. On hearing the news Ishim Sultan abandoned his campaign. He
returned in haste towards Tashkent and finally came upon Tursun Sultan at Sairam,
north of Tashkent. Engaging him in battle, he defeated Tursin Sultan who managed
to flee the battlefield, only to be subsequently captured and put to death. At this stage
Abili Sultan came over from Andijan to join Ishim. Together they drove Tursun
Sultan's nominee, Murad Sultan, out of Shahrukhiya. Then Ishim set siege to
Tashkent and when the town fell he wrote to Imam Quli to offer his submission.
Imam Quli thought it best to accept the fait accompli by confirming Ishim as
governor of both Tashkent and Turkestan. This turned out to have been a wise move,
for Ishim was so pleased with his achievement that he behaved as an exemplary
vassal until his death two years later.
One interesting result of the execution of Tursin Sultan was that Abu *1-Ghazi,
who had been staying with Tursin, asked permission to leave Tashkent for Bukhara.
Ishim let him go, but the 23-year-old Khwarazmian Prince was not made very
welcome by Imam Quli. The khan could not forgive him for having stayed so long

with his enemy. Abi ’1-Ghazi was not tempted therefore to remain in Bukhara. And
when he received messages from his Turkmen-supporters asking him to return to
Khwarazm, he decided to try and wrest the throne from Isfandiyar. At first Isfandiyar
fled to Hazarasp, which enabled Abu ’1-Ghazi to seize Khiva. But soon afterwards
Isfandiyar returned with Sharif Muhammad whom Imam Quli had sent to help him,
and Abu ’1-Ghazi was taken prisoner. He was sent to Iran in about 1628 and
remained there in captivity for ten years, nursing equally bitter feelings against his
brother and against the ruler of the khanate.!14
In India Jahangir's death was followed by an all-out struggle for power between
his sons and grandsons. The new Emperor, his grandson Dawar Bakhsh, reigned
less than three months. He was toppled and executed by Shah Jahan who assumed
the title of Emperor on 30 January 1628 and who tried to eliminate all possible rivals
by having his brother Shahriyar blinded and several other relatives put to death.
Despite these drastic measures Shah Jahan was not universally recognised for another
three years and during this time he had to fight several major rebellions.!!5 It is
during this period of transition that we first hear of ‘Abd al-‘Aziz, Nadir
Muhammad's eldest son, who was to play an important part in the history of the
khanate. This is when he marched with his father against Kabul, an attack which is

generally condemned by Mughal historians as pure aggression, but which is said by
Mahmud b. Wali to have stemmed from the purest motives. Since the Balkh historian
is generally reliable and honest, and since Nadir Muhammad could hardly have
marched on India without good reason while his brother's ambassador was at the
Emperor's Court, it seems necessary to consider carefully this version of events.
It should be mentioned that, in contrast with the general practice of Iranian and
Ottoman rulers who saw their sons only as potential rivals and therefore either

eliminated them or confined them to the harem, Nadir Muhammad was eager to give
his children positions of authority. As soon as ‘Abd al-‘Aziz reached the age of 11 in
1035/1625-6, his father named him governor of the former Khutlan province then
113 Apak Khan, who died some time that year, may have still been alive.
114 Mahmid b. Wali (Ethé), 110a-1a. Aba ’1-Ghazi, tr. 329-38, text 307-16.

115 Hodivala, 270-1. CHI, IV, 182 and ff.
172

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known as Kulab. And when ‘Abd al-‘Aziz took up this post, under the tutelage of the
ataliq “Abd al-Rahman Ushin who had defended Balkh against Rustam Muhammad
in 1613, he at once asserted himself. Hearing that the poverty of the area was due to
repeated attacks in recent years by the Qirghiz, he decided to teach them a lesson.
Despite ‘Abd al-Rahman's misgivings, ‘Abd al-‘Aziz marched against their
strongholds and camping-grounds in the mountain passes near Kashghar and, after
inflicting several defeats upon them and storming their strongholds, he compelled
them to sue for peace. As a result of his campaign Kulab was not troubled again, and
by 1634 it had become a rich area, which produced much corn, and was well able to

pay its taxes in gold.1!16
Delighted with his success ‘Abd al-‘Aziz looked round for another opportunity to
demonstrate his military skill and some time after Jahangir's death he suggested a
campaign against Kabul. Mahmud b. Wali tells us that, taking advantage of Shah
Jahan's rebellion against Jahangir, Shah ‘Abbas had marched towards Kabul in
1036/1627,117 instructing the governor of Qandahar, ‘Ali Mardan, to do likewise.
When

‘Abd al-‘Aziz heard of Jahangir's death, the civil strife in India, and Shah

“Abbas's presence near Kabul, although only thirteen at the time he insisted with his
father that they should march on Qandahar themselves, allegedly in order to protect
Mughal interests in the area by restraining the Shah. Mahmid b. Wali explains that
Nadir Muhammad was reluctant to agree to this scheme, as he did not want to
prejudice the khanate's good relations with India. But he agreed to act after being told
that messengers were constantly plying between Qandahar and Iran and that the
loyalty of Kabul to the Mughals was doubtful. He could not risk letting Kabul fall
into hostile hands, for it was too dangerously near to Badakhshan. He accordingly set
off to stop ‘the Qizilbash either interfering in the affairs of Kabul or even possibly
annexing Hind (India)’. Some time during 1628 he marched in the direction of
Kahmard and besieged Duhak which was then in Iranian hands. He also sent an
envoy to the people of Kabul to offer his help, but they refused to listen to his
messenger.
A little while later, hearing from his spies that Kabul not only meant to secede
from India altogether, but had written to “Ali Mardan for assistance, Nadir
Muhammad abandoned the siege of Duhak and prepared to march on Kabul. First,
however, he had to send troops against the Lagham4n tribe who had killed many
traders from the khanate and had cut the route to Kulab. After dealing with them, he

turned his attention to Kabul and laid siege to the town. The inhabitants fought
fiercely. After a long and bloody siege Nadir Muhammad found out that Shah Jahan
had finally disposed of all his rivals, and that the Iranian army had returned to
Qandahar. This being the case, there was no longer any need for him to remain in the
area, so he returned to the khanate.!18
So much for Mahmid b. Wali's version of events. Another account of the
campaign, also penned by a historian from the khanate, throws a different light on
Nadir Muhammad's motives for undertaking the campaign. Hajji Mir says that it was
undertaken in revenge for an attack on Badakhshan by Mughal troops. These troops

116 Mahmid b. Wali (Ethé), 218a-9b. See Mahmid b. Wali, More tain, 38, for a detailed
description of the province allotted to the Prince.
117 Mahmid b. Wali (Ethé), 200b. In fact the Shah appears to have remained in Georgia and
Mazandaran, but he may well have sent some troops towards Kabul.

118 Thid., 200b-203a.

173

Imam Quli

had apparently been sent to conquer the province, but as it was strongly defended,
they went back without challenging the defenders, although they took all they could in
the way of plunder. Nadir Muhammad then marched to Kabul in retaliation but was
forced to turn back after his brother wrote, asking him to abandon his undertaking in
consideration of their earlier alliance with India, and Jahangir's recent attempts at
establishing good relations.
Now for the Mughal version of the campaign. Nadir Muhammad, who was
purely motivated by greed, marched to Duhak with 15,000 men. Having failed to take
this town he went on to besiege Kabul. After three months he heard that Shah Jahan
had sent an army of 20,000 against him, by which time about 7,000 out of his 15,000
men had left for the khanate. These were the seasonal fighters or Alman, who took
booty instead of pay for their services and who only enrolled for short campaigns
which were expected to be highly productive of booty.!18 In view of the discrepancy
between the numbers of their armies Nadir Muhammad therefore decided not to
engage the Mughals in battle and fled back to Balkh in early September 1628. One of
the Mughal historians, Muhammad Salih, even alleges that in his haste to get away
Nadir Muhammad covered the distance in three days instead of the usual eleven.119
But this allegation should be discounted as part,of the Mughal propaganda drive to
discredit a ruler who nearly twenty years later caused Shah Jahan to suffer great

losses of men, money and prestige.!2° In fact it would appear that Nadir Muhammad
found time to ravage Kabul before leaving, and even Shah Jahan's biographer,
Lahauri, says that during the retreat Yalangtush, who had taken part in the siege, (had
time to) seize, repair and garrison the fort of Bamian.!21
While Nadir Muhammad was besieging Kabul there was more trouble in the
eastern part of the khanate following the death of Ishim Sultan in early 1038/AugustSeptember 1628. Abuli Sultan, who was outside Tashkent at the time with an army,

at once entered and seized the town. Instead of seeking the khan's approval and
asking to be nominated as governor of the town, he went on to have the khutbah read
in his own name, thus denying the khan's authority in the area. This was, of course,
unacceptable. Imam Quli at once sent to Balkh for help, and Yalangtish Bi, who had
only just returned from Bamian, was sent off with an army to deal with the rebel.
After a first encounter with Yalangtish outside Tashkent, Abili Sultan fled to
Kashghariya. Tashkent then opened its doors to Yalangtish and when Imam Quli
arrived shortly afterwards, he named ‘Abdallah Sultan, son of the former khagan
Baqi Muhammad, to the post of governor. But ‘Abdallah Sultan did not retain this
post for long. Tashkent had been ruled by Qazaq Princes nearly continuously since
the death of “Abd al-Mu’min, either through seizing the town or as the result of their
nomination as governor by one of the rulers of the khanate. They had become so
greatly attached to the town that Imam Quli soon felt obliged to re-consider his
cousin's appointment as governor. When Abili Sultan wrote shortly afterwards to
apologise for his misdeeds and to pledge his submission, the khan thought it wise to
accept his apologies and to appoint a new governor in the person of Abili's grandson
Pir Muhammad Sultan. Satisfied that peace would be maintained and that his authority
118 See further about the Alman in Burton A., "Who were the Alman?".

119 Hajji Mir, 193a-4a. Lahauri, I, i, 206-15, Muhammad Salih, Amal, I, 292-302. Muhammad
Amin, 158a, 159a.

120 See further about the Mughal bias against the ruler of Balkh in Burton, "Nadir Muhammad".

121 Qipchaq Khan, 272a. Lahauri, I, i, 260.

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1611-41

over the area had been re-established, Imam Quli then returned to Bukhara and

‘Abdallah Sultan disappeared from the pages of history. !22

Nadir Muhammad's campaign against Kabul had caused the new Emperor, Shah
Jahan, to develop an abiding dislike for him, but he did not hold Imam Quli
responsible for his brother's conduct. He made this plain by sending an embassy to
Bukhara only two months after Nadir Muhammad left Kabul. The fact was that,
despite his friendly approaches to Shah ‘Abbas in 1622 when he needed support
against his father, Shah Jahan was determined to retake Qandahar from Iran. Imam
Quli's offer of help with recovering the town, as conveyed by ‘Abd al-Rahim
Khwajah, first to Jahangir, and now to the new Emperor, was valuable and not to be
ignored. Shortly after his accession, therefore, he prepared to send a return embassy
to Bukhara to accompany ‘Abd al-Rahim Khwajah, but ‘Abd al-Rahim Khwajah had

died by the time the ambassadors were ready to leave. Like his father Shah Jahan had
been deeply impressed by the personality of the ambassador and by his high standing.
He had treated the khwajah with the greatest respect and generosity, allowing him to
sit in his presence and giving him rich presents. When he was told of ‘Abd alRahim's death, he at once sent a message of condolence to the khwajah's son,
Muhammad Sadiq Khwajah. The young man was later received at Court where he
was given 30,000 rupees, a bejewelled dagger and a precious robe. Then he was
permitted to leave for the khanate with his uncle, Hasan Khwajah, and in the
company of two prestigious Mughal envoys.
One of these envoys, Miran Sadr Jahan, had been sent to the khanate 42 years
earlier, in 1586, to present Akbar's condolences on the death of Iskandar. The other
ambassador, Hakim Hadhigq, was the son of Hakim Humam, who had led the 1586
embassy to the khanate. The ambassadors left India on 16 Rabi‘I 1038/13 November
1628 with various bejewelled gifts for Imam Quli worth 150,000 rupees, including a
magnificent tent of silk and gold, valuable horses and elephants, and even one of
Akbar's own sabres. They also brought a letter from Shah Jahan in which he
deplored Nadir Muhammad's attack on Kabul but declared that he was prepared to
overlook it in order to preserve his family's ancient links with the khanate. He would
regard it therefore as a youthful aberration due to the advice of evil counsellors.
When the ambassadors arrived in the khanate, they found, to their amazement,
that Imam Quli would not give them an audience. They waited six months to see the
khan, but even then they were only granted permission to see him ‘on the road’ when
he was on the way to the hunt. Imam Quli's strange behaviour was due to
Muhammad Sadiq Khwajah's account of his interview with Shah Jahan. Not only
had the Emperor asked about the khan's beloved ones, which was against all the rules
of Muslim etiquette, but, on being told that Imam Quli was free from any wordly
attachment and that his mind was (only) occupied by religious matters, he had
laughed out loud and asked ‘where did your ruler see the world that he should have
no partiality for worldly things?’
In fact Imam Quli had a particular attachment for a handsome young man, ‘Abd
al-Wasi‘ Bi, with whom he roamed the streets of Bukhara at night, incognito, trying
to find out about the problems of his people. In the circumstances Shah Jahan's jest
touched him to the quick. He was determined to prove the Emperor wrong and to
show that he was indeed not interested in material things. He tried therefore to devise

122 Mahmid b. Wali (Ethé), 111a-2b.
WS

Imam Quli

a way of seeing, but refusing, the rich gifts which Shah Jahan had sent him, without
severing his links with India. Turning to his uncle, Nadir diwanbegi, he explained his
predicament. If he received the envoys at Court he would have to take the gifts they
brought with them. But he did not wish to do so, Allah's will being that he should
‘pay no attention to the presents of any ruler’. On the other hand it would be improper
not to receive them at all. Perhaps it would be preferable for the envoys to go back
forthwith. His uncle thought otherwise and suggested that the problem would be
solved if the khan met them out-of-doors, and not in his palace.
At the appointed time the ambassadors accordingly waited for the khan, but Imam
Quli walked past and studiously looked away. They called out to him in anger, which
forced him to look in their direction, but after scarcely a glance he gave away the
numerous gifts which they had carefully set out for his inspection. Feeling that he had
thus avenged his honour and demonstrated his detachment from material things,
Imam Quli agreed to give the ambassadors a proper audience some time later. On this
occasion, after reading Shah Jahan's letter, he accepted the one present which Hakim
Hadhig had managed to keep when all the others had been given away. This was
Akbar's sword. When the sword stuck fast and did not come out of its scabbard he
mocked the ambassador and his master by saying ‘your swords are hard to pull’, but
Hakim Hadhig, who was quick-witted, explained that this was only because the
sword in question was a sword of peace. Had it been a-sword of war, he added, it
would have easily come out. His repartee pleased the khan who kept him in the
khanate for about eighteen months, during which time he was repeatedly invited to
Court. The ambassador was even asked to adjudicate between the two Court poets.
Imam Quli was particularly delighted when he based his choice on a clever pun,
saying that the composition of Turabi (earthy) should get the prize for, although
Nakhli (the palm-tree) was eloquent, the palm-tree grew out of the earth.!23
Hakim Hadhiq had not been long in the khanate and had not yet been received by
Imam Quli when Shah Jahan sent a detachment of troops to Bamian in April-May
1629, which took the fort from the garrison left there by Yalangtish and razed it to
the ground. Although this was probably done in revenge for Nadir Muhammad's
campaign to Kabul, the Emperor may have also wished to signify his displeasure at
Imam Quli's failure to receive his envoy. If this was the case, then the Emperor's
action misfired for, not only did Imam Quli not hurry to receive Hakim Hadhigq, but
he subsequently kept him an inordinately long time in the khanate. No other action,
however, was taken by Imam Quli in retaliation. Whether or not he chose to consider
the Bamian incident as a private matter which concerned only Yalangtish, he sent
back Hakim Hadhig with a rich and exotic assortment of gifts for the Emperor. These
included bejewelled goods from China, Kashghariya, Muscovy and Iran, horses from
Turkey, hunting-birds from the Afghan mountains and spinels from Badakhshan.
When Hakim Hadhiq delivered these gifts on 17 Rabi‘I 1040/24 October 1630,
together with a letter in which Imam Quli said he wanted to strengthen their friendly
links, Shah Jahan must have been satisfied with the outcome of his ambassador's

123 |
Ahauri, I, i, 193-8, 232-6. Hajji Mir, 194a-7a. Muhammad Yisuf Munshi, 255a-6b, 251la-2a,
erroneously says Jahangir was responsible for the jest which insulted the khan, and also places
the Mughal embassy before Jahangir's death. Muhammad Salih, Amal, I, 314-8. Muhammad

Amin, 165a and ff.

176

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mission.
!24
During this period all was well on the Iranian front. Although Nadir Muhammad
may have attacked Kabul to prevent it falling into Iranian hands, he had no intention
of attacking Khurasan and disrupting the peaceful status quo arranged with such
difficulty in 1623. He exchanged several ambassadors with the former governor of
Marw, Budagh Khan Qajar, two of these ambassadors being Nadir Bik Shawa‘it who

was later sent to India, and Yarik Qalmaq.!25 Shah ‘Abbas also kept to the 1623

agreement. He saw to it that Rustam Muhammad caused no problems in the province
of Balkh, and he himself concentrated on fighting the Ottomans and Georgians in the
west.
The situation only changed when he died on 24 Jumada I 1038/19 January 1629
and was succeeded by his eighteen-year-old grandson Shah Safi. Nadir Muhammad
and his amirs no longer felt bound to honour the agreement made with Shah ‘Abbas.
On the contrary, they decided to take advantage of the confusion which followed the
change of régime, and the rebellions which resulted from the execution of princes and
government officials by the new monarch.!26 In the summer of 1629 the long-serving
governor of Maimana and qish begi Uraz Bi, who had taken part in the recent
campaign to Kabul, accordingly marched to Maruchaq which by then was in Iranian

hands.!27 He set fire to the crops of the area and attempted to take the town, but made
little progress. After twelve days of siege and constant fighting, he decided to change
his tactics, raised the siege and began to build a fort on the banks of the river
Murghab, hoping that it would at once rival and threaten Maruchaq. At this stage the
Commander-in-Chief

of the Khurasan

armies, Zaman

Bik, who had been on

campaign in Nesa and Darun, arrived in Mashhad, from whence he despatched an

army to provision Maruchagq. Uraz Bi sent 1,000 men to intercept them, but they were
defeated and many prisoners were taken, including Uraz Bi's own nephew and a
nephew of Yalangtish. Uraz Bi hastened to write to Zaman Bik, apologising for the
incident and disclaiming all responsibility for the campaign. He added that Nadir
Muhammad wanted peace and would send an ambassador to Shah Safi with the usual
messages of condolence and congratulation on his accession. The messages were
passed on to Shah Safi, and since he was concerned about reports that the Ottomans
were preparing to attack Baghdad, he accepted both the apologies and the disclaimers.
Furthermore, as a gesture of goodwill he released the prisoners who had reached him
in late Rabi‘I/27 November 1629. Imam Quli followed suit, releasing two Iranians
recently captured near Chahar Jay, and peace reigned once more in the frontier
region, at least for the next 18 months. Such was Shah Safi's confidence in this
newly-won peace that he even took a regiment of musketeers from the army in
Khurasan for use against the Ottomans. This helped to strengthen his army and to
discourage the Ottomans, who abandoned their attempt to recover Baghdad and

withdrew on 14 November 1630.128
Two other events in the autumn of 1630 were to have a great impact on the history
124 |
ahaurti, I, i, 260-1, 318. Hajji Mir, 197b.

125 Mahmiid b. Wali (Ethé), 199b.
126 Rabino di Bogormale. CH Iran, 280.
127 It is not clear when the town was taken from the khanate to which it belonged in 1621. See
Mahmid b. Wali, 193a, for confirmation of this.

128 Mahmad b. Wali (Ethé), 196a. Muhammad Ma‘sim, 43-45. Iskandar Beg, Dhail, 25-28.
Hammer, Histoire, 1X, 138-53.

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Imam Quli

of the khanate. First, the Torgout Qalmaq, who had begun to camp near the river
Emba after their wars with Ishim in 1626, moved their encampments even closer to
the khanate. Their chief Ho Urluk and several thousands of his followers moved their
autumn camp from Siberia to the Qara Qum desert. This meant that the Qalmaq, who
were a force to be reckoned with, had to be taken into account by practically all
Bukharan ambassadors and traders travelling to Muscovy. At about the same time, in
early 1040/August-September 1630, there was more trouble in the khanate connected
with the town of Tashkent. When the governor of this town, Pir Muhammad Sultan,
died suddenly, his grandfather Abuli Sultan tried to take it over. Imam Quli was
incensed and sent an army to the area. Abili Sultan was defeated and taken prisoner,
whereupon he at once begged for forgiveness. Perhaps because he had achieved so
little he was assured that Imam Quli would accept his apology, on condition that he
went to Bukhara to offer his submission. Abili Sultan accordingly set off for
Bukhara, but his party was waylaid, a battle took place and he was put to death by the
yasawul ‘Ali Murad. ‘Ali Murad thought that he was rendering the khan a service, but
Imam Quli was not a bit grateful. On the contrary, he feared that the Qazaqs would no
longer trust him because they might believe that ‘Ali Murad had acted on his orders,
and it was with the greatest difficulty that Nadir Muhammad persuaded him to forgive
the yasawil. Nevertheless Imam Quli decided to march to Turkestan in order to
prevent any possible outbreak of rebellion in the province. When he arrived in the
area, however, he was relieved to find that the elders of the various towns and
villages flocked to him with expressions of submission. He only had to name new
governors to Turkestan, Tashkent and Andijan, and after doing so he was able to
return to Bukhara.
Imam Quli had appointed his own son, Iskandar Sultan, to Turkestan and

Tashkent and his nephew, Muhammad

Yar Sultan,!29 to Andijan, but to his

disappointment and anger Muhammad Yar soon decided that he was unequal to the
task and left for Balkh. Imam Quli was therefore obliged to choose another governor
for Andijan. As he had no personal preference for any candidate he took the advice of
the local elders and, at their request, he appointed a certain Fadil Khwajah, hoping
that this would secure peace in the area. Fadil Khwajah's appointment was indeed
successful, but as will be seen Imam Quli's son would prove to be disappointing as

ruler of Tashkent.13°
A few months later peace on the frontier with Khurasan was broken with a
Bukharan raid on Bala Murghab and Badghis. In a letter to Shah Safi dated 9
Shawwal (1040)/11 May 1631 the governor-general of Khurasan, Hasan Khan, who
had sent an army to deal with the “‘Uzbegs’, reported complete success. He also said
that he had taken as many as 300 prisoners, of whom he sent some to Court, but this
claim is unconfirmed and may well have been exaggerated. A second attack, which he
reported in November 1631, is better documented and from the evidence available
elsewhere, it is clear that his reports could be totally misleading. Hasan Khan
dismissed this second attack with contempt although it was led by no less a personage
than Nadir Muhammad's son ‘Abd al-‘Aziz. Many ‘Uzbegs’, he said, were killed
trying to take Ghuriyan, and when they moved towards Gham (Jam?), Khaf and
129 Mahmid b.Wali (Ethé), 117a. This Prince's Mother was Imam Quli's sister. His father, Payanda
Muhammad, was a cousin of Imam Quli's father.

130 Mahmiid b.Wali (Ethé), 113a-7a.
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1611-41

Bakharz, they fared no better, so they took ‘a small number of cows, camels and
sheep’ from the local nomads and left for the khanate. In view of their (alleged) lack
of success Shah Safi decided to be magnanimous. He instructed his amirs not to
‘punish’ the assailants on this occasion, but also made it clear that swift retaliation

would follow the theft of a single kid or sheep in the future, and that all were expected
to be particularly vigilant.
So much for the Iranian version of events, as related by Muhammad Ma‘sim.
Mahmud b. Wali gives a very different account of the campaign, according to which
“Abd al-‘Aziz was in fact very successful. Unlike the governor of Herat, the Balkh
historian was not himself involved in the action and was not hoping either for favours
or for advancement to result from his description of this particular campaign. His
account can thus be regarded as more objective. Mahmid b. Wali explains that ‘Abd
al-‘Aziz, who was then governor of Shiburghan, decided to march after hearing that
pilgrims and traders from the khanate had been repeatedly attacked and robbed in
Khurasan. He marched with just over 2,000 men to Jijektu and thence to Badghis,
refusing to wait, as instructed, for the reinforcements which his father was sending
him from Balkh and Badakhshan. After taking much booty near Badghis and pulling
down the forts of the area, he continued to Tabat,!3! from whence his men raided
Jam, Khaf and Bakharz, demolishing all the local forts. At this stage he was told that
Hasan Khan was on his way against him with an army of 300,000, and in view of the
discrepancy between their forces he reluctantly left for the khanate. There the booty
taken was shared out, his own sizeable share including as many as 20,000 sheep, 500

horses, 200 strings of camels and a large quantity of weapons.!32 Of these he sent
3,000 bows, a number of swords, horses, jewels and other items to his father as a
propitiating gesture and, no doubt because of his generosity and the success from
which it stemmed, Nadir Muhammad found it easy to forgive him for disobeying

orders. 133
In 1632 ‘Abd al-“Aziz was back in Khurasan. This time he was sent there by his
uncle. Imam Quli had been concerned to hear that Rustam Muhammad had been
raiding the province of Balkh from Ubeh, and that there were still large numbers of
Iranian troops in Khurasan. In view of this and of his nephew's easy success in
1631, he had decided that a pre-emptive campaign into the province was essential. A
two-pronged attack was decided upon and was accordingly organised, Nadir
diwanbegi being sent to Marw, and “Abd al-‘Aziz to Maruchagq.
When Nadir diwanbegi arrived at Marw with 15,000 men, he found that the

governor had just died and that the governor's son and intended successor, Murtada
Quli Qajar, had not yet reached the town. The situation seemed ideal, so the siege of
the town was conducted with great vigour. Although, disappointingly, reinforcements
got through to the defenders of the town, Murtada Quli was taken prisoner as he tried
to make his way towards his post. Nadir diwanbegi was delighted with his capture,
but the garrison of Marw did not capitulate. Instead they continued to fight fiercely
and, if we are to believe Iranian sources, at that stage heavy casualties were even
inflicted on the ‘Uzbek’ forces. In the circumstances, and since he probably knew that
131 South of Torbat-i Jam. Probably identical with Taiba which Mahmid b. Wali mentions later in
the text.
132 A string of camels, or gatdr, was a rather loose term which could mean anything between 7 and
150 camels.

133 Muhammad Ma‘sim, 96-97, 107-8. Mahmid b. Wali (Ethé), 221b-3a, 231a.

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Imam Quli

a large army under Khalaf Bik and Rustam Muhammad was on its way to raise the
siege, Nadir diwanbegi decided to give up his undertaking. He left for Bukhara,
taking back his distinguished prisoner and a lot of booty. Imam Quli treated Murtada

Quli most generously, and even allowed him to return to Khurasan. This was partly
out of admiration for his prisoner, who had apparently fought gallantly with only 35
men against a force of some 1,500 Bukharan soldiers. It was also because the khan
considered himself related to him, Murtada Quli's mother having once been married to
Imam Quli's father.
Meanwhile ‘Abd al-‘Aziz had marched to Maruchaq with Yalangtish Bi, the ataliq
‘Abd al-Rahman and a force of some 20,000 men. After much fierce fighting they
took the town, but one of their amirs, Sagi Hajji, had been captured by the other side.
By this time Imam Quli had agreed a cease-fire with Shah Safi, and Nadir diwanbegi
had left Marw, so ‘Abd al-‘Aziz was ordered to abandon the newly-conquered town.
This was most disappointing but, since all the Khurasan troops, which had originally
prepared to march on Marw from Mashhad, were now making for Herat and
Maruchaq, the Prince had no alternative but to obey orders and he returned to the
khanate, after ravaging the area surrounding Maruchaq.
Shah Safi was relieved to hear of ‘Abd al-‘Aziz's departure from Khurasan
because a serious situation had developed in the west following a major Ottoman
attack and the outbreak of a rebellion in Georgia. All available troops were needed.
He at once ordered the reinforcements meant for Khurasan to change course and to
make for Georgia. At the same time, in a second show of goodwill for Imam Quli, he
released Saqi Hajji.134 Disappointingly for the khanate, however, the Iranian amirs
did not follow his lead and did not observe the agreed cease-fire in Khurasan. The
troops which had gathered in the province were eager for battle and spoils. They were
disgruntled after weeks of indecision and fruitless marches towards Marw and Herat.
When they heard that ‘Abd al-Aziz had left Maruchaq, Rustam Muhammad and Hasan
Khan, who were as frustrated as their troops, decided to pursue the retreating army,
in the hope of scoring easy successes. And they were able to kill stragglers and to
take prisoners before returning to Khurasan. A few months later they sallied forth
again in order to take advantage of the fact that the Balkh troops had disbanded for the
winter. This time they raided Jijektu and Maimana, ravaged the area and took many
prisoners whom they sent to Shah Safi. It is not clear whether or not they had
attacked with the Shah's approval,!35 but Shah Safi tried to dissociate himself from
their action by returning these prisoners to the khanate. However, if he hoped for
peace on the frontier with Khurasan, he was to be disappointed, for, as will be seen,
the province was attacked twice during 1633.
Before that happened Nadir Muhammad had sent an army to put down a rebellion
in Badakhshan and also despatched an embassy to Shah Jahan, possibly at his
brother's suggestion. Both the expedition and the embassy were successful. Nadir
Muhammad's ambassador, Waqas Hajji, arrived in Akbarabad in late Dhi al-hijja/18
July 1632 with gifts of horses, camels and suits of armour. He also brought a
carefully-worded letter by which Nadir Muhammad hoped to improve his relations
with the new Emperor. In this letter, which is only known through the Emperor's
134 Iskandar Beg, Dhail, 102-8. Muhammad Ma‘siim, 117-9, Mahmid b.Wali, 117a, 207b-9a, 231a.
135 Iskandar Beg, Dhail, 108. Muhammad Ma‘sim, 126. The Shah had visited Rustam Muhammad
in September 1632 and may well have known of his intention in advance. Mirza Beg, 401b-2b.

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answer to it, Nadir Muhammad appears to have congratulated Shah Jahan on his
accession. He also apologised for the siege of Kabul, explaining that he had
undertaken it while as yet unaware of Shah Jahan's accession, and he suggested joint
action against Iran. Waqas Hajji's success can be measured by the fact that he was not
detained in India and that when he was dismissed, only seven months later, he took
back with him a Mughal ambassador, Tarbiyyat Khan, who delivered to Nadir
Muhammad a long and elaborate letter from the Emperor. Tarbiyyat Khan's arrival
must have pleased Nadir Muhammad as it meant not only that his apologies had been
accepted, but also that, in all probability, the Emperor had appreciated the treatment he
meted out to a pretender to the Mughal throne. Nadir Muhamad had refused point
blank to help Shah Jahan's first cousin, Baisingar, because he wanted to establish
friendly relations with Shah Jahan. And Baisingar, who had arrived in Balkh during

Waaas Hajji's stay in India, had soon left to seek support instead in Iran.136
But to return to the letter which Tarbiyyat Khan delivered to Nadir Muhammad

circa March 1633.!37 Shah Jahan began by describing his recent successes at length
in order to impress Nadir Muhammad with his military prowess. Not only had he
chased the Firangi Infidels out of Bengal after four months of constant fighting, but in
Deccan his troops had crushed enemy forces of 35,000 and had taken five forts which
yielded the considerable income of 500,000 rupees, then equal to 2,500,000
Bukharan tanga. Turning next to Nadir Muhammad's apologies, the Emperor
expressed surprise that news of his accession had taken so long to reach Balkh. He
made plain his disapproval by saying that he ‘hoped that the excuse given was
true...as it was not seemly that such an action, which did not further (the cause) of
religion, should have been carried out...especially against Sunnis’. Finally, he
referred to the suggestion of joint action against Iran and, although he refused to
commit his answer to paper, he said that his ambassador would discuss the matter

orally with Nadir Muhammad.138
Satisfied that the Emperor was generally well disposed towards him, and that he
approved of the plans which he had outlined for action against Khurasan, Nadir
Muhammad sent marauders to Sarakhs and Zurabad that month and began to collect
an army. In May 1633 the governor of Marw, Murtada Quli, wrote anxiously to the
Shah saying that he suspected these forces to be intended for a major attack on
Khurasan. And indeed Yalangtish seized Sarakhs shortly afterwards, leaving there a
garrison of 1,000 men. Shah Safi then gathered a large army and sent it to the area
under Khalaf Bik and Rustam Muhammad Khan. They stormed Sarakhs in
September, took some 200 prisoners and put them all to death, except for their
leaders, one of whom was another of Yalangtish Bi's numerous nephews. Shah Safi
was delighted with his army's success, but he hastened to send the remaining
prisoners back, hoping that his magnanimity would secure for him Yalangtish's
gratitude, and that the Bukharan discomfiture would discourage the people of the
khanate from carrying out further attacks.
Shortly afterwards Khalaf Bik reported on his campaign at Court and was warmly
greeted by Shah Safi. But it was soon realised that the troublesome ‘Uzbegs’ of the

136 Muhammad Ma‘sim, 126. Mahmid b. Wali (Ethé), 232b-3b, 275b. Hammer, Histoire, IX, 98,
says mistakenly that Baysanqir ruled India for a few months after Jahangir's death. Iskandar Beg,
Dhail, 124-5, confuses Baysangar with Balaghi/Dawar Bakhsh, who was put to death in 1627.

137 Lahauri, I, i, 465. He had left India after Rajab, and probably in Sha‘ban 1042/February 1633.
138 [bid., 466-72.
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Imam Quli

khanate were by no means discouraged by their recent defeat, and that the Iranian
troops of Khurasan should be kept on the alert. In November that same year “Abd al‘Aziz plundered the area of Gham (Jam?) and Langham. Although the Shah was told
that much of the booty taken was subsequently recovered, he hastened to appoint a
new commander-in-chief for his forces in Khurasan, and Amir Khan was sent off to
the province in January 1634.139
While the armies of Balkh were fighting in Khurasan, Imam Quli had further
problems in the east. In the early spring of 1633 the Torgout Qalmaq, who had been
camping in the upper reaches of the Turgai and Yaik/Ural rivers for about a year,
extended the area under their domination to include all the lands between the SyrDarya and the Yaik. The Torgout then joined forces with the Qazagqs in an attack on
Tashkent and Sabran. Under Ho Urluk's sons Louzan and Korosan, they set siege to
both towns and captured them. Some of their number even penetrated as far as
Bukhara. Their attack was as unexpected as it was successful, for they took as many
as 1,700 prisoners from Sabran, together with large quantities of booty. However,

Imam Quli had regained full control by June 1633.14°
As soon as the Qalmaq danger was over, Imam Quli, who was more than usually
short of money after the campaign, and who had.long since used up the income from
his 1627 and 1631 issues of coins, decided to try and improve his financial situation
by renewing contact with Muscovy.!4! A substantial part of his income arose from
the taxation of imports, so it was vital for him to encourage the activities of traders,
especially those who travelled abroad. One can assume therefore that he instructed the
commercial envoys whom he sent to Muscovy and Siberia, not only to sell their large
consignments of official goods and to purchase others for him, but also to try and
obtain better terms for Bukharan merchants in general.
Imam Quli's envoy to Muscovy, Hajji Ata Quli, went to Astrakhan with a suite of
six. Crossing the Caspian on a Muscovite busa, he arrived there early in October
1633 and delivered a letter in which Imam Quli explained that he was taking
advantage of the ‘cleaning up’ of the route between the two countries to renew their
ancient links. He was probably referring to a recent Muscovite success against the
Torgout. Ho Urluk and his son Daichin had attacked the Noghay encampments near
the Yaik, Muscovite troops were sent to help the Noghays and, although defeated
initially, they eventually restored the peace. Daichin then promised that in future he
would protect the Noghay settlements, which meant that travellers from the khanate
could hope for a safe overland journey to Muscov. Imam Quli also requested the Tsar
to allow his ‘old servant Hajji Ata Quli’ to purchase valuable goods for him in
Muscovy, and these goods, which he did not list, apparently included items which
originated in India, Iran, Tureh (Siberia?), Kazan' and Moscow. Finally, and perhaps
in order to prevent a repetition of Khwajah Nauruz's unpleasant experience in 1613,
Imam Quli informed Tsar Mikhail that he had ‘sent orders’ for Ata Quli to travel ‘by
whatever route he wanted’ in Muscovy. No Muscovite official, he declared, should

dare interfere with his purchases, delay him in any way or ask him to pay Customs or
other duties.
139 Muhammad Ma‘sim, 135, 140-1, 152-3, 157, 158.
140 Thid., 139, 156. The Shah was informed of the attack and Imam Quli' success in restoring order
by Murtada Quli, governor of Marw. See Bogoyavlenskii ("Materialy", 67, 68, 70) for news of
the attack as taken to Siberia by a Bukhara envoy.

141 Davidovich, "Valdzheranskii sklad", 73-74.

182

1611-41

The Astrakhan voevoda and his colleagues were rather taken aback by Hajji Ata
Quli's arrival and by the tone of the khan's letter. They searched for rules of
procedure to be adopted towards an envoy of the khanate and found none, the
documents relating to the arrival in Astrakhan of ‘Abdallah's envoys in 1585 and
1589 no doubt having been removed to Moscow. Knowing only of envoys who had
by-passed Astrakhan and gone directly to Samara and thence to Kazan’, Nizhnii
Novgorod and Yaroslavl’, they decided to allow Hajji Ata Quli to leave for
Yaroslavl’. Before doing so, however, they assessed his goods carefully, in case the
Tsar ruled that he should pay duty on them.
After he left on 25 October they wrote to the Tsar asking for a positive ruling
upon any future liability of Bukharan commercial envoys to trade dues, but received
no answer. The Yaroslavl' voevoda therefore played safe: he kept Hajji Ata Quli in
the town and forbade him to sell his merchandise. Five months later the ambassador,
who was still in Yaroslavl’, wrote to Tsar Mikhail explaining that all his goods
actually belonged to the khan. He enclosed a complete list of these goods, asked to be
allowed to sell or exchange them for what he vaguely described as ‘items needed by
the khan’, and requested that all trade dues be waived. It is not known when, or even
whether, he was allowed to do so, but it has been suggested that he left Muscovy for
the khanate, presumably after completing his mission, before the end of 1634.142
Tsar Mikhail's silence did not stem from ill-will. He had simply been far too
concerned about events in the west to deal with the ambassador's request. A
campaign to retake Smolensk from Poland, started in 1632, had ended disastrously
with an entire Muscovite army surrendering to the new Polish king, Vladislav.
Complicated negotiations had taken place as a result and the Tsar, whose capable
father and co-ruler, the Patriarch Filaret, had died in 1633, was forced to agree to

Polish sovereignty over Smolensk and several other Muscovite towns. He also had to
pay an enormous war indemnity of 20,000 roubles. Although he managed to secure at
last a formal recognition of his right to the throne of Muscovy, it is hardly surprising

that the plight of Hajji Ata Quli failed to attract his attention.!#
While Hajji Ata Quli was in Yaroslavl', Imam Quli's envoy to Siberia, Kazi
Kaziev (Qadi al Quda’ or chief judge?) arrived in Tara in 1634, having travelled via
the encampment of the Derbet Qalmaq near Zaysan lake. Kazi Kaziev was to remain

in Tara for two years. During his stay his recent host, Kuisha, attacked Tara twice
and sent many embassies there to demande his release. In his report to the Tsar the
Tobol'sk voevoda appeared to believe that Kazi Kaziev had somehow colluded with
Kuisha, but there is no independent confirmation of this assumption. In fact Imam
Quli's relations with the Derbets were not particularly stable. From 1630 Kuisha's
father Dalai had been camping uncomfortably near the khanate in the Qara Qum and in
1635 he prevented his son from selling a Muscovite slave in Bukhara. That same year
Imam Quli waged war on Kuisha, holding him responsible (through his attacks on

Tara?) for Kazi Kaziev's excessively long absence from the khanate.!“4
The people of the khanate were to become more acutely aware of the existence of
the Qalmaq after 1633. Not only did they encounter them more and more frequently
when travelling to Muscovy and Siberia, but the Qalmaq made a practice of raiding

142 Materialy, 138-41, 142-3, 406.
143 Pares, 200-1. Dukes, 9-10. Riasanovsky, 194.
144 Miller, II, 462-3. Materialy po istorii russko-mongol'skikh otnoshenii, II, 26.

183

Imam Quli

the khanate, often in alliance with the Qazaqs. Furthermore, as early as October 1633,
and perhaps before Hajji Ata Quli left Astrakhan for Yaroslavl’, the Qalmaq broke the
agreement reached earlier that year and attacked the Yaik region. Writing to inform
Tsar Mikhail that they had closed the Emba route to travellers, the Khwarazmian ruler

Isfandiyar suggested a joint campaign by his troops and the Tsar's Noghay subjects
to reopen it. The following year a number of Qalmaq attacked the eastern regions of
the khanate. Troops were despatched against them and they were crushed, but Imam
Quli decided that they needed a sterner lesson. In early 1044/late June 1634 he sent
two amirs into the Qipchaq steppes to ravage their encampments. After a march of 35
days from Tashkent they reached the encampments, took many prisoners, killed all
who resisted, and returned

to the khanate,

fully satisfied with what they had

achieved. 145
Meanwhile, after resting in the khanate during the winter of 1633, ‘Abd al-‘Aziz
had resumed his attacks on Khurasan. He undertook or organised four campaigns in
1634, with varying success. The first, a raid on the Kusuya region north of Herat in
March, was led by his ataliq, ‘Abd al-Rahman, and was totally successful. On 18
Shawwal/6 April he was on his way back to the khanate with his force of 12,000,
having taken much booty. Encouraged by this success ‘Abd al-‘Aziz himself set off
for the Kusuya a few weeks later with some 20,000 men. But the inhabitants had
retired into the forts with their possessions and prepared to defend themselves
vigorously. He therefore decided to leave the area and to make a bid instead for Fara
in the south. On realising, however, that the position of this fortress made it virtually
impregnable, he gave up his undertaking and went back to the khanate, but not for

long. 146
In the autumn he returned to Khurasan with troops estimated at 3,000 by Iskandar
Beg, and at 20,000 by Muhammad Ma‘sim. He made for Mashhad and Sabzawar,

intending to ravage the area, but his expedition was a dismal failure. This was largely
because the commander-in-chief of Khurasan, Amir Khan, had been informed of his
movements in good time. Gathering together all available troops and musketeers, he
marched rapidly against ‘Abd al-‘Aziz under cover of darkness, and by virtually

unknown paths. When he arrived at dawn at Tajarrud,!47 where the Prince was
camping, he caught him entirely by surprise. However, ‘Abd al-‘Aziz and his men
fought courageously and fiercely. They fought from dawn until dusk, then, taking
advantage of the dark, they returned to the khanate, leaving most of their possessions
behind. The Khurasanis pursued them, taking many prisoners and killing an
estimated 3,000 men. When Shah Safi was told of Amir Khan's success and also that
“Abd al-‘Aziz's drums, standard, stock of weapons, ‘treasury’, library, horses and
camels had been taken, he was delighted. When the Prince's possessions were
brought to him he at once gave them away to Rustam Muhammad Khan, a clear

indication that he intended to support the pretender's claim to the khanate.148

Shah Safi's triumph and that of his protégé were short-lived, for less than two

weeks after the Shah was told of ‘Abd al-‘Aziz's discomfiture, he was once again on
his way to Khurasan. This time he came with 3,000 men without waiting for his

145 Materialy, 141-2. Mahmad b. Wali (Ethé), 117a-b.
146 Muhammad Ma‘sim, 163-4.
147 Not identified.
148 Muhammad Ma‘sim, 174-5. Iskandar Beg, Dhail, 150-2. Bijan, 48a-49a.

184

1611-4]

father's permission, and ignoring an express prohibition from his uncle. Once again
he marched towards Mashhad. On the way he apparently stormed several forts or
villages, took others which were offered to him by the terrified inhabitants, and found
time to besiege and take the town of Taiba. At this stage, however, news that Iranian

troops from many parts of Khurasan had gathered in Mashhad made him change his
plan of campaign. He decided to avoid this town altogether and march instead on
Nishapur. Dividing his army into two, he sent one part via Qa’in and Tun, while he
himself went via Turbat, taking prisoners and booty on the way. Near Turbat he
fought two successful engagements which added over 3,000 camels to the booty
taken so far,!4° but shortly afterwards he was told that an army of 100,000 men was
marching against him. Realising that he could not possibly hope to achieve any
success against such a vastly superior force, he was forced to take his amirs' advice

and return to the khanate.15°
Some time before ‘Abd al-‘Aziz's last campaign in Khurasan, his father sent
Tarbiyyat Khan back to India. When the ambassador arrived at Shah Jahan's Court
on 22 Jumada II 1044/13 December 1634 he delivered a rich variety of gifts for his
master, including 45 camels, 45 horses, Chinese goods and costly carpets, all of
which presumably came from Nadir Muhammad. The Emperor, however, took more
pleasure in a gift which the ambassador himself had purchased in Balkh - a
manuscript written by a great-granddaughter of his ancestor Babur. Tarbiyyat Khan
does not appear to have brought any letter from Nadir Muhammad for the Emperor,
but this apparent omission was rectified a few months later when the ruler of Balkh

despatched an ambassador of his own called Nabahra Bi to Shah Jahan.!5!
When ‘Abd al-‘Aziz returned to the khanate from Khurasan he went to Balkh and
begged his father's pardon for not consulting him before the campaign. As he had
achieved a great measure of success Nadir Muhammad forgave him once again and
even rewarded him generously with gifts of money, horses, camels, books, carpets.
Then he sent the young man to Samarqand to make his peace with Imam Quli,
suggesting as a propitiatory gesture that he offer to help his uncle in fighting the
Qalmaq who had recently attacked the outlying parts of the khanate. But by the time
‘Abd al-‘Aziz and his ataliq, ‘Abd al-Rahman Ushin, reached Bukhara on 21
February 1635, the emergency seems to have been over. His uncle, however,
accepted his apologies and showed due appreciation of his success in Khurasan.
Although ‘Abd al-‘Aziz was kept at Court for about a month, this was not a
disciplinary step. The young man was treated generously and rewarded, as was ‘Abd
al-Rahman, before they were sent back after the end of Ramadan in March 1635.152
During the young man's stay in Bukhara the amirs of Khurasan had sought
revenge by raiding Jijektu, one of the towns which he administered. Nadir
Muhammad sent Yalangtish Bi and others to defend the area, but they were too late.

The raiders had left by the time they arrived. While the amirs were there, however,
they realised that the affairs of the province of Shiburghan had fallen into disarray,
owing apparently to some misconduct on the part of “Abd al-Rahman Ushun. Nadir
Muhammad therefore relieved the amir of his post as ataliq, and although ‘Abd al-

149
150
151
152

Probably Turbat-i Haidariya.
Mahmid b. Wali (Ethé), 223b-6b.
[
ahauri, I, ii, 65-66.
Mahmad b. Wali (Ethé), 226b-7a.

185

Imam Quli

‘Aziz was by then over 21, he was given a new ataliq in the person of Uraz Bi Ming.
But it was some time before the Prince and his new ataliq got matters under control.
In the meantime Nadir Muhammad had trouble with his second son, Khusrau,
who had governed the province of Khutlan (Kulab) ever since 1040/1630-1 when
‘Abd al-‘Aziz left to take up his new post as governor of Shiburghan and Maimana.
Khusrau appears to have got into bad company, befriending would-be rebels and
perhaps also Shi‘a (‘people of error’). Unable to control the young man his ataliq
resigned. When Nadir Muhammad heard his report and also numerous complaints
against his son from local elders and tribal chiefs, he took swift action. He appointed
a new energetic ataliq for his son and ordered the execution of the worst
troublemakers, whereupon Khusrau fled to Hisar and rebelled openly, writing to his
uncle for support. Imam Quli, however, refused to support him against his father, so
Khusrau was forced to submit and to ask his father's pardon. He was kept in Balkh
for a year as punishment and was only allowed to return to Khutlan in about February
1636, by which time his father felt satisfied that his rebellious spirit. But the Prince
did not stay long at his post. Hearing that his beloved uncle, Imam Quli, whom he
preferred to his father, was having difficulties with the Qazaqs, Khusrau abandoned
Khutlan and ‘fled’ to Samarqand.
Khusrau's behaviour made Nadir saiinaitieta resolve to keep his sons under
stricter control. Although he continued to give them large areas to administer as their
fief or igta‘, he insisted that they spend several months every year in his company,
during which time others administered their fiefs. He started this policy in
Rajab/December 1635, when he summoned ‘Abd al-‘Aziz to Balkh in order to get him

married, and then kept him hunting in his company until March 1636.!53
Despite his problems with Khusrau Nadir Muhammad found time to get together a
splendid array of gifts for Shah Jahan, which his ambassador, Nabahra Bi, delivered
to the Emperor on 20 Dhi al-qa‘da 1044/7 May 1635. The gifts were so valuable, at
70,000 rupees, and so unusual that Shah Jahan's biographers thought it worthwhile
to describe them in exceptional detail. They included over 20 hunting-birds of
different types, some of which were specially trained to catch deer, while others
specialised in catching herons and cranes. There were also 100 horses, 50 camels, a
female racing camel, 100 pieces of lapis lazuli, valuable carpets, ordinary carpets,
Russian hides and Chinese goods. Nadir Muhammad was certainly determined to win
the Emperor's goodwill! His ambassador was equally generous, for he delivered 40
horses and 35 camels, together with other offerings of his own. And the Emperor
responded by giving him not only the usual money and rich outfit, but also a

bejewelled dagger and scabbard, some valuable coins and a number of special gold
and silver coins, which had been used for the traditional weighing ceremony. He also
rewarded the ambassador's treasurer and the Jiibari shaikh who had come with him,

and hardly detained the party. Four months only after their arrival, they were on their
way back to Balkh with an ambassador from Shah Jahan
This ambassador, Mirak Husain Khafi, carried gifts of even greater value than
those sent by Nadir Muhammad, for Shah Jahan thought it necessary to show off his
greater power and wealth. These gifts, valued at 125,000 rupees, included hundreds
of emeralds and rubies, several bejewelled objects and a female elephant with a silver
litter. Mirak Husain was also given a letter for the khan, together with 700,000
153 [hid., 227a-b, 228a-30b.

186

1611-41

rupees’ worth of goods to sell in the khanate and 500,000 rupees for his purchases in
Balkh.!*4 Clearly the Emperor valued both his friendship with Nadir Muhammad and
his commercial links with the khanate. Unfortunately his letter to Nadir Muhammad
has not survived, so we can only speculate about its contents, but it seems likely that
Shah Jahan suggested that they take joint action against Iran, the retaking of Qandahar

being high on his list of priorities.155
Meanwhile Imam Quli had despatched another commercial envoy to Muscovy.
Like Hajji Ata Quli in 1633, Behbid crossed the Caspian to Astrakhan on a
Muscovite boat. He arrived there in early September 1635, less than two years after
Ata Quli, with 3,788 roubles' worth of official goods, quite a large investment for a

ruler who was chronically short of money.!5° It is not known when he finished his
business and went back to the khanate, but Imam Quli must have been pleased to hear
that, like his predecessor, Behbiud was exempted from Customs dues, which in his

case would have added up to 303 roubles.
!57
While Behbud was making his way to Muscovy a major rebellion broke out in the
eastern parts of the khanate. It was led by a number of Qazaq Princes who arrived in
Otrar from Kashghariya in summer 1635, having fled there in 1040/late 1630 after
Abuli Sultan was captured and put to death. They were hoping to persuade Nazar
Sultan, a fellow Qazaq living nearby, to join them, but while they were negotiating
with him, Imam Quli sent the Qazaq Murad Sultan, who was loyal to him, with
orders to bring to Court the remainder of the rebels captured in the eastern regions in
1633. The governor of Otrar at once seized this opportunity to rid the area of Nazar
Sultan, and sent him off with them under guard. Unfortunately. the convoy was
attacked by a group of rebels from Andijan who not only freed all the captives and
killed many of the guards, but also prevailed on the two Qazaq Princes to join their
revolt. Nazar Sultan even agreed to become their leader and they all went back to
Andijan, where they seized the governor, Fadil Khwajah and his family.
Imam Quli responded rapidly, despatching an army of 100,000 men to Andijan
under Nazar Bi Naiman at the beginning of Rabi‘I 1045/14 September 1635. But
while Nazar Bi was on his way the rebellion escalated and Fadil Khwajah and his
family were put to death. This was a serious offence. It was also gratuitous, for the
governor had been well liked during his term of office. Imam Quli, who had taken the
wishes of the local people into account when appointing Fadil Khwajah, was
indignant, but worse was to come.

In Tashkent Imam Quli's son, Iskandar, had

become very unpopular. With the help and support of his ataliq (Bik Muhammad
Quruq) and his servants he had helped himself liberally to his subjects’ possessions,
and ‘laid the hand of oppression (i ‘tisaf)’ upon their wives and children. Imam Quli
tried to remedy the situation by asking for a delegation to come over and suggest an
alternative ruler, but the Tashkentis did not come. They still remembered how he
154 Altogether worth 1,200,000 rupees or 6,000,000 tanga of the khanate.
155 | djhauri, I, ii, 88-90, 101, 104. Muhammad Salih, ‘Amai, II, 98-100, 144-5. Mahmid b. Wali
(Ethé), 203b. Shah Jahan wrote to the Sultan some time later saying that he had mentioned such

a plan to the rulers of the khanate and secured their agreement.

156 Tf at that time the tanga (khanlyq) was still worth 2 altyn as in 1621, then the goods sent by the
khan were worth 63,133 tanga. See Davidovich, Istoriya, 96, 91-93. See Lahauri, II, 542-3 and

Muhammad Yisuf Munshi, 259b, for the contrast between Imam Quli’s financial situation and

that of his brother.

157 Materialy, 191-2.
187

Imam Quli

punished them for collaborating with the Qazaqs in 1620-1, and they feared a similar
fate if they dared to complain openly about his son. However, when they heard of the
Andijan rebellion, they at once made a pact with the rebels and secured their cooperation against the Prince. Whether the rebels actually surrounded the town is not
clear, but Iskandar realised that the situation was dangerous, and he left Tashkent in
the middle of the night with his ataliq and a small group of retainers. As soon as he
left the rebels seized the outer fortifications of Tashkent. The Prince was making for
Shahrukhiya and Andijan where he hoped to obtain the help of Nazar Bi Naiman and
the Bukharan army, but he never got there, for he came across the encampment of the

hostile Qirama tribe, a battle was fought and he was killed, with all his followers.!°8
Imam Quli was distraught when he heard of Iskandar's death. Determined to
avenge his only son, he wrote to Balkh to ask for reinforcements and prepared to
march to Tashkent, but Nadir diwanbegi and Khwajah Hashim persuaded him to wait
for the Balkh contingent. When the reinforcements arrived under the command of
Yalangtish Bi, he sent them off at once to join the army which he had earlier
despatched to Andijan. The combined armies gave battle to Murad Sultan and Nazar
Sultan outside Pskent, forcing them to retreat into the town. Yalangtush then besieged
Pskent but it soon became clear that the townspeople were unwilling to fight. Murad
Sultan therefore had no option but to negotiate and beg the khan's forgiveness, and
Yalangtish was able to turn his attention to Tashkent while Nazar Bi Naiman returned
to Andijan.
Yalangtish had no difficulty in securing all the key positions in Tashkent, but
soon the situation was reversed, and he found himself under siege there. Murad
Sultan's repentance had been short-lived. He asked for reinforcements from the

Qalmaq,!59 and also from two Qazagq Princes, Jahangir Sultan son of Ishim and
Muhammad Yar son of Tursiin Sultan, and when these reinforcements arrived in midShawwal/circa 23 March 1636 Murad Sultan attacked Tashkent and Turkestan.
Yalangtush fought them off energetically and eventually forced Murad Sultan and his
associates to abandon the siege. They left to make a bid for Shahrukhiya but meeting
with no more success, they moved on to plunder the countryside round Pskent, at
which stage Nazar Bi Naiman marched against them from Andijan. Meanwhile, after
asking for, and receiving additional reinforcements from Balkh led by his nephew
Khusrau, Imam Quli set off from Samarqand to avenge his son. There were about

200,000 men in his army.!6°
Imam Quli made for Sairam, north of Tashkent, because he had been told
some of the Qazaqs had established their encampments near that town and he
determined to ‘exterminate’ them. Joining forces with Yalangtish he inflicted a
defeat on them outside this town. Then, after taking large numbers of women

that
was
first
and

158 Mahmid b.Wali (Ethé), 118a-9a. Iskandar's death and Imam Quli's reprisals have been placed
early in the reign, or else in 1613, by some eighteenth century sources (Hajji Mir, 184a-5b.
Muhammad Yusuf Munshi, 253b-4b), and also by modern historians who are based upon them
such as Abdurraimov (Ocherki, II, 244-7), but the date given by Mahmid b. Wali, who was in
Balkh at the time, is naturally preferred.
159 These Qalmaq cannot have been the Torgouts for at that time they were on good terms with
Bukhara. They are more likely to have been the followers of the Derbet Dalai who, like the
Qazaq Prince Jahangir, and perhaps in agreement with him, had been fighting the Torgout Ho
Urluk and his sons in 1635. Bogoyavlenskii, "Materialy", 72-73.

160 Mahmiid b.Wali (Ethé), 119b-121b, 291a.

188

1611-4]

children prisoner and seizing much booty, he marched on into the Dasht-i Qipchaq to
seek out the main Qazaq settlements and to continue his vengeful task. When he
arrived there he had nearly 3,000 people put to death, for he had sworn to kill until

the blood of the dead would reach his horse's stirrups.!6! Even his amirs were

apparently appalled by the carnage and begged him to stop, but he was unmoved. The
bloodbath continued, for he was determined to keep his oath, and they tried to think
of a way of making him relent. Finally they persuaded him to stand his horse in a
trough of water to which blood had been added to the required level and, satisfied that
he had kept his oath, he allowed the carnage to stop. However, his thirst for revenge
was not entirely quenched. He marched further into the steppes, taking many more
prisoners and killing 500 Qazagqs in a first engagement. Then he made for Yaldiz to
seek out the Qazaq Princes who had fled there.162
When he arrived the Qazaq Princes begged his forgiveness and offered their
submission, promising to pay once more the taxes (bdj and kharaj) required of
dutiful vassals. Perhaps because he knew that his army was tired after its long march
and might refuse to fight, Imam Quli accepted their submission. Satisfied that he had
not only avenged his son's death, but had also recovered control over the eastern

provinces, he agreed to forgive them. He then returned to Tashkent where he
punished all those who had collaborated with the Qazaqs. He had them thrown into
prison and gave his brother their possessions, including even their wives and
children, in order to show his gratitude for Nadir Muhammad's contribution towards
the campaign. Imam Quli then marched towards Andijan to pacify the area, sending
ahead

Yalangtush

with

4,000

men.

When

Yalangtish

reached

Akhsiket

representatives from the rebels came to his camp. They begged him to intercede with
Imam Quli, but he was adamant and made it clear that the khan would not forgive
them, so they returned to Andijan and prepared for battle. Yalangtish reported to
Imam Quli who ordered him to continue towards Andijan and sent him reinforcements
of 100,000 men under his nephew Khusrau. Yalangttish and Khusrau then gave
battle to the rebels and, after several successful encounters the rebellion and the yearlong campaign came to an end. Imam Quli was at last able to return to Samargand in
September 1636, and he did so after appointing a capable and trusted amir, Bik
Ughli, to Tashkent in the hope that he would keep the province under control and that

there would be no further problems in the area.!®
One unfortunate and unforeseen result of the Andijan rebellion was the death of a
former ruler of Kashghariya. Sultan Ahmad/Fulad had reached Balkh in June 1636,
after losing his throne to ‘Abdallah Khan, of the Turfan branch of his family. He
appealed for help to Imam Quli and was given an army of about 70,000 men. Then,
on his way to Kashghariya where he hoped to regain his throne, he made a fatal
decision: he tried to help Imam Quli by taking part in the siege of Andijan, and during
the battle he was killed. His death marked the last Bukharan attempt to intervene in

Kashghariyan affairs.164
161 Muhammad Yusuf Munshi places this massacre in Tashkent. It has been suggested that the
description of Imam Quli's gruesome revenge is apocryphal, as this type of apocalyptic revenge
is mentioned time and again in Oriental texts. However, the fact that it is attributed to him by
such a reliable historian as Mahmid b. Wali lends credence to the story.

162 Yaldiz has not been found, but this may have been another name for Ayaguz near Lake Balkash.

163 Mahmid b.Wali (Ethé), 121b-3a.
164 Bartol'd, Sochineniya, VII, 182-3. Shah Mahmid 68b-69a, 211. Akimushkin ("Khronologiya",

189

Imam Quli

While Imam Quli was busy following events in the eastern provinces of the
khanate, he had, to his dismay, acquired a large number of unwanted new subjects.
These were 12,000 Qirghiz from the Karakorum who in Rajab 1045/DecemberJanuary 1636 had unexpectedly arrived in Hisar and had asked permission to stay.
There having been no trouble in the Kulab or Badakhshan area from the Qirghiz since
1625, Nadir Muhammad interceded with his brother on their behalf and Imam Quli

reluctantly agreed to their request.!©
A few months earlier a former ambassador of Balkh, Waqas Hajji, had left the
khanate to settle in India. When he arrived at the Emperor's Court with his son in
May 1636, Shah Jahan, whose latest ambassador to Balkh, Mirak Husain, had not
yet returned, was delighted to get up-to-date information on the khanate. He
welcomed Wagas Hajji and his son and gave them a variety of rich presents, ranging
from a horse with a golden bridle to a bejewelled dagger. He also enrolled them at
once in the Mughal hierarchy of service, all of which increased Nadir Muhammad's
anger at his former ambassador's defection. He feared that the defection might not
only reflect badly upon him, but also lead to vital information about the khanate
reaching Shah Jahan, whom he regarded with some mistrust as a potential enemy. He
showed his anger by refusing to let Waqas Hajji’s wife and daughter follow him to
India, and his refusal had serious repercussions for the khanate, for the former

ambassador became his determined enemy and persuaded Shah Jahan, a few years

later, to attack the khanate. 166
In the meantime Nadir Muhammad sent troops to Khurasan in late May 1637.
There appear to have been three reasons for this expedition, which followed some 18
months of peace in the area. Firstly, Nadir Muhammad was preparing to go on
pilgrimage to Mecca. In the circumstances an onslaught on the Shi‘a of the area may
have seemed a suitable way of demonstrating his religious fervour, while also
facilitating his journey.!67 Secondly, he wanted to help his allies, the Emperor and
the Ottoman Sultan, both of whom were keen to attack Iran in order to regain,

respectively, the towns of Qandahar and Baghdad from the Safawids. Shah Jahan and
Murad IV both realised that a well-timed attack on Khurasan from Balkh would help
their cause, for it would keep part of the Iranian troops occupied while they engaged
them on other fronts. Shah Jahan indeed may have been planning such an attack when
he despatched Mirak Husain to Balkh in 1635 for, in a letter to Murad IV written circa
1637, he wrote that he had mentioned his plan to the rulers of Ma wara’ al nahr and
Balkh, and that they had agreed to ‘move at the same time and make on their side all

possible exertions’.168 It is possible therefore that Nadir Muhammad purposely
undertook the campaign while Mirak Husain was still in Balkh in order to show his
willingness to please the Emperor.
The third and perhaps the most compelling reason for the campaign was the
sudden death of the capable Commander-in-Chief of the armies of Khurasan, Amir

160) places his death in 1638, but no evidence has been found to suggest that Andijan was
besieged again that year. Lahauri, II, 349. Mahmid b.Wali (IVAN Uzb.1375), 88b.

165 Mahmid b. Wali (Ethé), 277a.
166 1
Ahauri, I, ii, 166; II, 528. Muhammad Salih, ‘Amal, Il, 184.

167 See Qipchaq Khan, 272a for Nadir Muhammad's pilgrimage in 1047/after 26 May 1637.

68 Hammer, "Memoir", 466, 479-80. The letter was delivered in Istanbul in 1048/after May 1638,

and would have taken some 12-18 months on its way.

190

1611-41

Khan. The Khurasan troops were bound to be somewhat at a loss as a result.
Furthermore, since the Ottomans had already attacked Baghdad the bulk of the Iranian
forces would be concentrated in that area and it was unlikely that reinforcements could
be spared for Khurasan.!® The time therefore seemed ideal for a campaign.
Nadir Muhammad had intended to lead the army himself, but his amirs persuaded
him to let ‘Abd al-“Aziz take his place. The campaign began with some success in the
area of Badghis, where the Prince ‘cleansed the area of the contamination’ (of
Shi‘ism). He then marched southwards towards Herat but he was infuriated when his
soldiers attacked the town on arrival, without waiting for orders and losing a number
of men. It was essential to discipline them for the future and to cure them of their
rashness. “Abd al-‘Aziz accordingly took strong action: he forbade the burial of the
dead and had the corpses slung over the backs of camels for all to see. He was then
told that all the governors of Khurasan had gathered in Mashhad and were preparing
to relieve Herat. In the light of this he changed his plans and decided upon a daring
plan of action: he would leave Herat and make for Mashhad, where he would have a

good chance of success if he arrived after the departure of the Khurasani army and if
he could take the defenders by surprise. This plan required maximum speed and a
concentrated effort on the part of his troops, but once again the men got out of
control. First the body of men sent ahead under Allah Birdi Bi became separated from
each other. Then, after an all-night march, a number of them saw an advance party of
Iranian troops and rashly attacked without awaiting orders. When the Iranians
pretended to scatter before them, they set off in hot pursuit only to be led into an
ambush. A fierce battle followed, and although in the event they carried the day, both
their commanders were killed.
“Abd al-‘Aziz then arrived on the scene. He had the amirs' bodies removed to
Balkh and prepared to besiege Mashhad, but after a careful examination of the
situation, he became convinced that the town was too strongly fortified to be taken
without a lengthy siege. Since this would inevitably result in heavy losses, and since
it was only a matter of time before the bulk of the Iranian army changed direction and
returned to Mashhad, he abandoned the idea of a siege and reluctantly went back to

the khanate for the winter.
So much for Mahmid b.Wali's account of this rather disappointing campaign
which Iranian historians describe as a total ‘flop’ for the army of the khanate, a
triumph for their side, and a perfect demonstration of ‘Abd al-‘Aziz's lack of valour.
According to them, the local population retired with its flocks into the various
fortresses of Khurasan and although ‘Abd al-‘Aziz had more than 30,000 men with
him, he achieved nothing. He went cautiously as far as Jam where he spent eight
days, then he sent his amirs ahead to Mashhad, but when he was told that they had
been taken prisoner and that their soldiers had fled, he returned at once to the khanate

without even attempting to fight.!7°
The following spring there was trouble in the eastern provinces. Khujand and Ura
Tipa were attacked by the Qazaqs, but an army which included troops from Balkh

under ‘Abd al-Rahman Ushin quickly pacified the area.!7! Several of the Qazaq

169 Bijan, 67b-68a.
170 Mahmid b. Wali (Ethé), 235a-6b. Bijan 67b-68a. Iskandar Beg, Dhail, 205-6. Muhammad Yusuf
Walih, 112a.
171 Mahmiad b.Wali (Ethé), 240b, 236b, gives either early 1048 or late 1047 as the date by which
order had been restored.

191

Imam Quli

Sultans involved were sent to Balkh where they were put to death, except for Baqi
Sultan, son of Tursiin Sultan, who was merely kept in custody, no doubt because his
mother was Nadir Muhammad's aunt. A few weeks later, however, Baqi Sultan was

set free by rebels. They took him to the fortress of Barbar in Hazarjat territory in
Rabi‘I (between 13 July and 12 August) and gathered support on their way. The
situation was particularly serious because they intended to appeal to Shah Jahan for
help. Nadir Muhammad therefore marched against them himself. The rebels fled on
hearing of his approach, but his son Khusrau pursued them, compelled them to give
battle and defeated them after a day-long struggle.
Baqi Sultan, who was captured during the battle, was taken to Balkh and put to
death. The ringleaders of the rebellion were all brutally killed under torture, in order
to deter further would-be rebels. Surprisingly enough, however, Nadir Muhammad
managed to keep on friendly terms with Baqi Sultan's brothers. Two of them went to

visit him six months later and he gave them a warm welcome.!72
During 1638 there was much contact, at all levels, between the people of Balkh
and India. Relations between Nadir Muhammad and Shah Jahan seemed excellent. In
the spring of 1638,!73 when Mirak Husain Khafi at last returned to the Emperor's
Court, he was accompanied by a number of travellers from the khanate, all of whom
presented their respects to the Emperor and received gifts of money in return. Some
of them were officials from Balkh, but a certain Muhammad Zaman came on behalf of
the well-known amir, Yalangtish Bi, with gifts worth 10,000 rupees. His arrival was
welcomed by the Emperor for it seemed to imply that, following Nadir Muhammad's
lead, Yalangtish intended to live at peace with the Mughals. His ‘peace offering’ was
accordingly well received and the Emperor demonstrated his generosity by sending

20,000 rupees to Yalangtish and giving 3,000 to his envoy.!74
On 29 April 1638, an ambassador called ‘Abd al-Ghafir arrived at Shah Jahan's
Court. He brought the Emperor a letter from Nadir Muhammad, and presents of
horses, camels and hunting-birds which may well have been gerfalcons, for Lahauri
describes them as hawks capable of hunting cranes and deer. These gifts seem to have
been much appreciated for the Emperor received the ambassador several times and
treated him most generously, directing that a total of 84,000 rupees be given to him
and his two companions during their stay. Shah Jahan's generosity must have pleased
Nadir Muhammad, as did the fact that his envoy was only kept six months in India,
for all this seemed to indicate that the Emperor had a high regard for him. He may
have been puzzled, however, to find that the Master of the Hunt (mir shikar) who
had accompanied ‘Abd al-Ghafur to India had been kept at Court. However, it seems
likely that Qadi ‘Umar was asked to stay behind in order to demonstrate the use of the
gerfalcons which he had brought for the Emperor, and he was sent back only four
months later, suitably rewarded with a rich robe, a valuable colt and 2,000 rupees.
Although ‘Abd al-Ghafur had been dismissed in late October 1638, he only
reached Balkh circa 24 Dhu ’1-qa‘da/30 March 1639. The fact that his return journey
had taken five-months was no doubt due to difficulty in crossing the mountains
between Kabul and Balkh so late in the season. Nadir Muhammad, however, was
172 Thid., 236b-8a, 247a, Mahmid b.Wali says that Shah Sa‘id and his brother arrived in Balkh in
early Sha‘ban/6 February 1639.

173 Actually in Dhi ’1-qa‘da 1048, i.e. between 17 March and 16 April 1638.
174 |
Ahauri, II, 91-94.
192

1611-41

delighted with his report that Shah Jahan was interested in joining forces against ‘the
Qizilbash rabble’. The Emperor specifically asked for Mansi Hajji, a very able amir
and official of the Court, to be sent over to discuss the details of their joint
intervention and Nadir Muhammad hastened to send the amir to him, with gifts valued

at 700,000 tanga (175,000 rupees).!75 Perhaps he had not realised that Shah Jahan's

insistence on negotiating with Mansur Hajji stemmed less from respect for a capable
diplomat than from the hope that he might entice the amir to enter his service, as

Mansir Hajji's sons had done shortly before that date.176

Nadir Muhammad would soon recognise his mistake and understand, with bitter

disappointment, that Shah Jahan was less than friendly, his mention of a joint
campaign against Iran in the near future being a mere ploy to disguise more sinister
plans against Balkh. The Emperor's change of heart had come about during ‘Abd alGhafur's stay in India, partly as the result of Waqas Hajji's nefarious influence over
him, and partly because of his recent, and unexpected recovery of Qandahar.
The recovery of Qandahar, which had been in Iranian hands since 1622, was
entirely due to a stroke of good luck. It so happened that in the early part of 1638 the

Iranian governor of this town, ‘Ali Mardan,!77 lost the trust of Shah Safi and his
advisers. Whether he was ordered to send his mother and wife to Court as guarantors
of his good behaviour, as claimed by RGhrbohlm, or was ordered to report to Court
himself to account for the shortfall in his remittances to the Shah as claimed by
Muhammad

Jahangir Khan, he did not obey. He was then ordered to surrender

Qandahar, but offered the Shah a large sum of money instead and continued to govern
the town. Shah Safi decided to have him removed from his post and an army was
gathered for this purpose. When the governor heard that it was on its way, he wrote
to offer the town to Shah Jahan. His letter arrived at Shah Jahan's Court on 24
Shawwal 1047/16 March 1638, at about the time when ‘Abd al-Ghafitr was

despatched from Balkh, and the Emperor took immediate action.178 Troops stationed
in Kabul and Multan were at once instructed to converge on Qandahar, and gifts were
sent to ‘Ali Mardan. Two weeks later he was enrolled into the Mughal hierarchy of
service. On 18 Dhi ’1-hijja 1047/3 May 1638 he formally surrendered the town to the

former governor of Multan, Qalij Khan, before leaving for Delhi with his family.!”
Like his grandfather Akbar, Shah Jahan had thus acquired Qandahar with the
minimum of effort. And having taken the town Shah Jahan felt, as Akbar had in

1595, that he no longer needed the support of the ruler of Ma wara‘ al-nahr against
175 [pid., I, 96, 100, 103-4, 112, 134. Mahmad b.Wali (Ethé), 238a, 261b,176a, 179a, 180b,
185b, 192a-3a. Mansir Hajji had served Nadir Muhammad since 1606, first as a parwanchi, and
later as a dadkhd. See glossary for these appointments. He had on more than one occasion led

the khan's armies.

176 Lahauri, I, 545.
177 Mahmid b.Wali (Ethé), 238b, calls him ‘Ali Murad Khan Zik.

178 Rohrbohim, 13n.83, says that part of this army had to be diverted to Baghdad which was then
under threat. But according to Hammer (Histoire, IX, 310, 337), although the Ottomans did
begin to prepare the Baghdad expedition in Shawwal (16 February-17 March) their army only
arrived at Baghdad on 8 Rajab/15 November, or long after the surrender of Qandahar. Lahauri, Il,
228):

179 Thid., 23-51. Muhammad Jahangir Khan, 154-61, explains that ‘Ali Mardan had held his post for
10 years and had served the Shah efficiently. When he was summoned to Court he made excuses

because he knew that the new diwan (Sara Taqi) was hostile to him and he feared that Shah Safi

might have him put to death on arrival. Riazul Islam, Indo-Persian relations, 103-4.

193

Imam Quli

Iran. Instead he would attempt to reconquer the land of his forefathers. He was
confident that Shah Safi would not attempt to retake Qandahar in the near future. In
any case the Iranian ruler was on his way to defend Baghdad and he would be
engaged there for months, for the Ottomans had made up their minds to seize the
town at all costs.
Unfortunately the number of troops sent by Shah Jahan to Qandahar appears to
have been so disproportionate to the task of defending his new acquisition that Nadir
Muhammad, who had heard by then of the takeover of the town, was very concerned.
Some time in May or early June he sent an envoy to Qandahar to enquire whether
these troops were intended simply to garrisont the town, or whether there was to be a
campaign into Khurasan. He also wrote to congratulate the Emperor on his
acquisition, and to offer help in the event of a Mughal campaign against Khurasan.
However, his envoy, the yasawul ‘Abd al-Rahman Kinkas, did not reach
Qandahar. A serious rebellion by the Hazaras against the Mughals meant that the road
to Qandahar was impassable. The envoy tried an alternative route via Kabul and
Ghazni, but was detained in Kabul for four months by the combined efforts of the
hostile governor of the town and Shah Jahan's eldest son, Shah Shuja‘, after which
he was sent back to Balkh. He was unable to report, as Nadir Muhammad hoped,
upon the deployment of troops in and around Qandahar. More seriously, he had failed
to deliver the letter in which Nadir Muhammad offered to help the Emperor's armies
in Khurasan, a failure which Mahmid b. Wali blames for the subsequent deterioration
in relations between the khanate and Mughal India. However, Nadir Muhammad must
have been relieved to hear on his envoy's return that the Mughals were busy trying to
control the Hazaras rather than marching westwards towards the khanate. No doubt
the subsequent arrival of Shah Jahan's letter suggesting joint action in Khurasan also
helped to allay his anxiety.
180
While ‘Abd al-Ghafir was in India, Nadir Muhammad took two initiatives aimed
at increasing his influence outside the khanate: he had attacked Khurasan and he sent
an embassy to the Tsar.
In the summer of 1638, possibly in order to defuse Shah Safi's likely response to
the loss of Qandahar and to show solidarity with Shah Jahan, Nadir Muhammad sent
Yalangtush Bi to Khurasan with a large force. Little is known about the expedition
which seems to have been a mere demonstration of strength in the mountainous area
south of Herat but, although it was dismissed as ineffectual by the governor of Herat,
it certainly showed the Iranians in Khurasan that they had to remain on the alert.18!
Nadir Muhammad's first major embassy to Muscovy is much more fully
documented. It was headed by a trader called Khwajah Ibrahim who had already been
several times to Muscovy and who was sent off some time between 15 May and 14
June 1638 (Muharram 1048), i.e. two to three months before Yalangtish Bi attacked
Khurasan. Khwajah Ibrahim took a rich and varied assortment of presents for Tsar
Mikhail, which included 4 pedigree horses, 2 silk carpets, various lengths of cottons
and muslims, some edged with gold, and at least 90 precious stones, some of which
weighed between 50 and 65 grams. Unfortunately he was attacked and robbed at

180 Mahmid b. Wali (Ethé), 239a, 261b. ‘Abd al-Rahman probably returned in about October 1638,
and the Emperor's letter, as mentioned above, was delivered by ‘Abd al-Ghafir in late March

1639.

181 \fuhammad Ma‘sim, 249.

194

1611-41

Chokur by the followers of the Torgout Prince Daichin who took most of his gifts.
!82
He also lost part of his suite, two members of which fled back to the khanate on
horses intended for the Tsar, taking with them his accrediting letters. The loss of his

credentials meant that Khwajah Ibrahim had little, if any, chance of being allowed to

carry out his mission. However, rather than return to the khanate by the same route,
he decided to continue his journey to Astrakhan, hoping to make the return journey by
sea. He had no further problems on his way, for Daichin's brother Louzan not only
welcomed him to his encampments, but even provided him with an escort and with
carts for himself and his suite.
When Khwajah Ibrahim reached Astrakhan on 12 January 1639 he was offered

the standard maintenance granted to a Bukharan ambassador, or a total of 8 den'gi,!83
3 charki (0.63 pints), and 3 kruzhki (6.3 pints) each of beer and mead per day, with
lesser amounts for his suite. This he indignantly refused, alleging that in the 19 years
that he had been trading in Moscow and Astrakhan he had never received less than 50
den'gi per day for his needs. His objection was duly reported to the Tsar but there is
no indication that his allowance was increased. On the contrary, it would seem that he
was punished for objecting, for he received neither money nor drink from the
authorities during the remainder of his seven months' stay. In about August 1639 he
at last left Astrakhan on a busa, as hoped, and he returned to the khanate to get new
credentials, leaving behind a racehorse as a gift for the Tsar.184
While Khwajah Ibrahim was in Muscovy a major crisis arose and the khanate
made ready for war with India, for it became known that Shah Jahan was preparing to
invade. The Emperor had been encouraged to do so by Waqas Hajji and by his amirs
who, having heard of the Qazaq rebellion of spring 1638 and the subsequent rebellion
of summer 1638 in Balkh, had persuaded the Emperor that the time was ripe to attack.
They insisted that Imam Quli would be fully engaged for some time dealing with
Qazaq and Qaragalpagq rebellions in the east. He would therefore be unable to assist
his brother in the event of a Mughal invasion. But their forecast was wrong. The
rebellions were quickly put down and calm had been totally restored in the eastern
provinces by the beginning of 1639. Imam Quli was so confident that this was so that
he spent the greater part of February and March 1639 in the province of Balkh, where
he was entertained in style by his brother, and also by local officials and amirs. And
while

he was

there the governors

of Tashkent

and Turkestan

wrote

to him,

confirming that ‘the rebellious Qirghiz, Qalmaq, Qazaq and Qaraqalpaq had become
obedient’. A second argument put forward by Shah Jahan's advisers, namely that
Nadir Muhammad had such few troops that he could not even get them into battle

array, was equally incorrect.!85
Unaware of these flaws in his amirs' reasoning Shah Jahan pressed on with his
military preparations, having men, weapons and provisions sent on to Kabul. Nadir
Muhammad, whose intelligence was better than the Emperor's, was soon informed
that 100,000 men had been despatched from Agra to Kabul in May 1639. The
situation was serious, and it was not improved by the fact that Qadi ‘Umar, the

182 Chokur has not been traced.
183 There were 200 den'gi (singular den’ga) in one rouble.
184 aterialy, 149-51, 407. It is not clear whether this was the same Khwajah Ibrahim who had
been sent on a mission to Iran in 1623.

185 Mahmid b.Wali (Ethé), 262a, 260a- 1a.

195

Imam Quli

Master of the Hunt, had recently returned from India with gifts from the Emperor.
Nadir Muhammad gathered an army and prepared to march, but then Imam Quli heard
that Shah Jahan's son, Dara Shikih, and not the Emperor himself, was to lead the
Mughal army. Convinced that it was unseemly for his brother to march against the
younger man, he suggested instead that ‘Abd al-‘Aziz take Nadir Muhammad's place
at the head of the army. ‘Abd al-‘Aziz was accordingly despatched a few days later in
the direction of the Hindu Kush with 20,000 mounted soldiers and other troops,
including 2,000 Qirghiz and Qalmaq, and 10,000 Alman irregulars, an energetic
response to the danger which is conveniently ignored by Mughal Court historians.
They prefer to portray the two khans as terrified at the prospect of an impending
invasion, pleading with Mughal officials to intercede with the Emperor on their
behalf, and offering to co-operate at any time against Khurasan and Iran.!8° There
can be little doubt that such accounts were biased and aimed at glorifying Shah Jahan,
while vilifying the khans of Ma wara‘ al-nahr. They will generally be discounted,
therefore, in favour of the more balanced account penned by Mahmid b. Wali.
He writes that the experienced amir and ataliq ‘Abd al-Rahman Ushin was sent
off with the Prince, that a number of Qazaqs and Qaraqalpags were also collected
together for the campaign,!87 and that Yalangtush Bi, summoned from Tashkent,
arrived in Balkh with his retainers and clansmen, ready for action. He adds that the
khans were greatly concerned when they discovered that Shah Jahan had been kept
informed about events in the khanate by a certain qadi, “Abd al-Latif, who was in
touch with the Naqshbandi khwajahs of the khanate. Nadir Muhammad was taken
aback, therefore, when on 10 Safar 1049/12 June 1639 an envoy from Shah Jahan's
second son, Dara Shikuh, arrived in Balkh. However, it was soon realised that he
had sent the embassy for a very specific reason, which was to allay any suspicions
which the rulers of the khanate might have entertained about his father's intentions.
Indeed, after delivering a gift of horses the ambassador, Muzaffar Husain, announced
that Shah Jahan had been in Kabul since 25 Muharram/28 May, the very openness of
this announcement being aimed, no doubt, at making the Emperor's presence in this
town seem straightforward and harmless. 188
This latest ploy to put the Ashtarkhanid brothers off their guard did not succeed.
In any case, on 26 Safar/28 June, two weeks after Muzaffar Husain's arrival, Nadir
Muhammad found out from his spies that Dara Shikth had left Kabul with over
50,000 men. The Prince was ostensibly on his way to deal with the Hazarjats who
camped in the south-west, between Barbar and Qandahar, but as the army was so

large, it was thought that there must be another purpose for the expedition.189 Dara
Shikuh's campaign could not be ignored. Nadir Muhammad sent Yalangtish Bi
towards Barbar with over 3,000 men to investigate the situation and to stop the
Mughal armies, but after Yalangtish's departure even more disquieting news was
received from Kabul. Mughal troops had been sent to the Hindu Kush and to the
Ghurband (Bamian) area. The message was unmistakable - Shah Jahan intended to

186 Thid., 262b-3a. Lahauri, II, 134, 152-3. Muhammad Salih, ‘Amal, II, 307.
187 The Qaragalpags were nomads who generally camped near the Qazaqs, in the vicinity of the SyrDarya.

188 Mahmid b.Wali (Ethé), 263a-5a.
189 Barbar has not been found, but would appear to have been situated on the river Helmand, west of

Kabul.

196

1611-41

invade the khanate.!9°
Nadir Muhammad summoned all available troops to Balkh, while Imam Quli,
who was then in Qarshi, prepared to go to Balkh himself, in order to supervise the
defence of the khanate. He sent ahead about 30,000 troops, but wrote asking his
brother to wait for him before taking action and Nadir Muhammad waited as
instructed. On 20 Rabi‘I/20 July 1639 Imam Quli arrived outside Balkh. Nadir
Muhammad went to meet him, dismounting and walking by his brother's bridle for
over a mile in token of respect. The customary banquet in the khaqan's honour took
place and, despite the seriousness of the situation, Nadir Muhammad managed to
lavish great quantities of money, food and gifts (mainly hunting-birds) on his
suzerain.
At this stage reinforcements and money were sent to ‘Abd al-‘Aziz who was at
Kahmard and he prepared for action. Meanwhile Yalangtish Bi, who had arrived at
the river Helmand on 1 Rabi‘I 1049/2 July 1639, i.e. four days only after leaving
Balkh, attacked the “Chaghatai’ army. In a first skirmish his men killed 80 Mughal
soldiers and took a number of prisoners who were duly despatched to Balkh. The
prisoners reached Balkh on 13 Rabi‘I/14 July, but instead of the message of
congratulations and encouragement which he expected, Yalangtish Bi received orders
from Balkh to hold his hand and avoid a battle. The amir was bitterly disappointed,

but he obeyed in puzzlement.!9!
Only later would he find out the reason for such disconcerting orders: - the khans
had received a long and detailed letter from Nadir Muhammad's latest ambassador to
India, Mansur Hajji, in which he reported that Shah Jahan had given up the
campaign. Mansur Hajji explained that the Emperor had been disappointed on arriving
at Kabul to find neither the messages of support from the nobles of Balkh and
Badakhshan, nor the welcoming letters and keys to the fortresses and villages of the
area, which he had been led to expect. It seemed clear that the campaign would not be
easy, and that he would have to fight for every inch of Ma wara’ al-nahr. When he
realised that there were no suitable roads for his army to make its way to the khanate,
that his son was reluctant to lead the campaign, and that provisions for the army
would be difficult to come by, he began to reconsider his decision. At this stage a
terrible famine broke out in the Kabul region. It resulted in the death of 12,000 of his
soldiers and 3,000 of their mounts (horses, camels and elephants), and in the total

breakdown of discipline in the army. Hearing that soldiers were plundering local
people at the suggestion of their superiors, Shah Jahan dismissed several highranking officers and managed to restore order. Clearly, however, this was hardly the
time to begin a difficult campaign, so he tried to find a way of giving up his
undertaking without losing face.
He pretended that he had only come to Kabul in order to discipline the Hazarjat
tribesmen and to pacify the peoples of the Qandahar region. But his excuse proved
less than convincing especially when it became known that Dara Shikuh's men had
been defeated near the river Helmand. The Emperor was thoroughly depressed by this
news, and also by news that, contrary to what he had been led to believe, the two
khans had joined forces and were in Balkh, ready to defend the khanate. He prepared

190 Thid., 265b-6a.
191 Thid., 266a-8a, 265b. Muhammad Ma‘sim, 276. News of Yalangtish's success reached the
Iranian capital during July.

197

Imam Quli

to ‘flee’ the area and return to Agra, but gave up his plan on realising that it would be
too damaging to his honour. And he remained in Kabul, hoping to find an

opportunity of regaining his lost prestige.!97
Mansir Hajji's arrival gave him a perfect opportunity to pretend that his relations
with the khanate were as friendly as ever before, and he made the most of it. The
ambassador was welcomed with particular warmth. He was given a private audience
in the Emperor's apartments and Shah Jahan told him that he wished to renew
(earlier) agreements with the khanate. When, shortly afterwards, it was learnt that

another army from the khanate (the one led by ‘Abd al-‘Aziz) had reached the Hindu
Kush and Kahmard, the Emperor was greatly concerned. He arranged for his
councillors to speak to the ambassador. They asked him to exert his influence in order
to ‘stop this army causing any trouble’ and to secure its prompt withdrawal. They
also informed him that Shah Jahan wished to return to Agra and to send ambassador
Shad Khan to the khanate so that he could deal with all outstanding problems and
confirm the old agreements between the two countries. This was most encouraging
news, for it meant that Shah Jahan was willing to abide by the treaty between Akbar
and ‘Abdallah which had established Qandahar and the Hindu Kush as their common

frontier, and that he would not therefore attack the khanate. Finally, Mansur Hajji was
given to understand that if the army of the khanate were recalled the crisis would be
over.
Imam Quli and his brother were relieved to read Mansur Hajji's letter. They
decided to accept Shah Jahan's message at face value, as no doubt it would suit him
to abide by his agreement with the khanate and it would be a few years before he was
again tempted to invade. Yalangtush and ‘Abd al-‘Aziz were accordingly recalled, and
the amir obeyed orders at once. The Prince, however, was reluctant to give up an
opportunity of gaining fame and booty. He pleaded to be allowed to march on Kabul,
but Imam Quli was adamant. He wrote to demand his return, and ‘Abd al-“Aziz was

forced to obey. He arrived in Balkh on 5 Jumada I/3 September, followed some ten
days later by Mansur Hajji, who reported on his mission and delivered rich gifts from
Shah Jahan. These included an Arabian horse worth 12,000 rupees, complete with
silver and jewel-studded accoutrements, 50 male and female Hindu slaves, and a

number of bejewelled sashes, gold dishes and robes embroidered with gold, most of
which Imam Quli, true to his usual practice, gave away.!93
Satisfied that the crisis was well and truly over, at the end of September 1639
Nadir Muhammad sent back Dara Shikih's ambassador, Muzaffar Husain, whom he
had kept in Balkh since June. In order to prove that he reciprocated Shah Jahan's
offer of friendship and also perhaps to show that he was more powerful and wealthier
than the Emperor's son, he sent Dara Shikih a very generous assortment of gifts,
which far outstripped the Prince's offerings, for its total value, according to Mahmid
b. Wali, was 500,000 tanga. These gifts included not only livestock (horses, camels,

greyhounds, falcons) and materials (silks, Iranian sashes, Bukharan turbans), but
even china and crystal vessels.
Meanwhile, true to his promise, Shah Jahan left Kabul and sent Shad Khan to
Balkh. He arrived there on 22 Jumada II/29 October 1639, or only six weeks after

192 Mahmiid b. Wali (Ethé), 268b-9a.
193 Thid., 269a-b, 271b-2a.

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1611-41

Mansir Hajji,194 with gifts, an affectionate letter from the Emperor, and a large

quantity of goods, which he was expected to sell in the khanate. In his letter Shah
Jahan wrote

of unity and love, and went on to ask the khans help in seizing

Khurasan, Sistan and ‘other wilayas in the west’. Although the khans must have been
pleased that he had reverted to his policy of joint action against Iran, his expansionist
schemes gave them cause for concern. The time was certainly ideal for an attack,
Iranian morale being at its lowest, for they had lost Baghdad to the Ottomans in
December 1638, and this loss had been confirmed by the Irano-Ottoman treaty of May

1639.19 But if Shah Jahan hoped that the khans would help him recoup his prestige

by a successful campaign, he was going to be disappointed.
The khans were unwilling to help. They were in no hurry to take up his offer,
and, although they probably allowed Shad Khan to sell the 600 lengths of red fustian,
the slaves, and the silver and gold items which he had brought to the khanate, they
made no effort to attack Khurasan. Nevertheless it suited them to reinforce their
newly-established friendship with Shah Jahan and for this reason both brothers sent
ambassadors of their own to India. Nadir Muhammad despatched the dastarkhanchi
Salih to Dara Shikth in the spring of 1049/1640 with a letter in which, to quote

Mahmud b. Wali, ‘the Emperor's hopes’ were ‘received favourably’. Imam Quli
made an even more significant gesture: he sent a long overdue first embassy to India.
He knew full well that Shah Jahan was hurt by his delay in doing so, and in view of
the crisis which had just been averted, he might have thought it wise to forgive the
Emperor at last for the coarse jest about his loved ones, now 11 years old!
The ambassador chosen for this mission was Uzbeg Khwajah, a capable and
experienced official, who had successfully discharged a mission to Jahangir in
1032/1623, and who was now relied upon to soothe Shah Jahan's ruffled feelings.
He arrived at the Emperor's Court in April 1640 with a retinue of five and was
warmly welcomed and well treated during his stay. A former ambassador to the
khanate, Tarbiyyat Khan, and a major amir went to meet him and his party outside
Delhi.!9® He was at once received in audience. And although he had to share this
audience with Nadir Muhammad's envoy to Dara Shikth and with an envoy from
Nadir diwanbegi, he was treated with greater respect as befitted his more exalted
position of khaqan's representative. Thus the dastarkhanchi Salih, who gave Shah
Jahan 45 horses from Nadir Muhammad and 35 from himself, only received a total
reward of 12,000 rupees plus a rich outfit of clothing. The envoy of Imam Quli's
uncle was given more valuable presents - a horse, a gold-handled knife, a sword and
shield encrusted with gold, a bejewelled dagger and 25,000 rupees in return for the
26 horses, 28 camels and ‘other things’ which he brought the Emperor. But the value
and variety of the gifts presented to Uzbek Khwajah was far greater. He gave Shah
Jahan 87 horses, 100 camels, 9 falcons and 9 Qalmagq slaves on behalf of Imam Quli,
and received two Iraqi horses, one gold bridle, two bejewelled daggers, one aigrette
and cap studded with jewels, one rosary of pearls and emeralds worth 60,000 rupees,
one sword with a gold and enamel hilt, one elephant and 45,000 rupees. The

194 Thid., 272a. Although Muhammad Salih, ‘Amal, II, 308, says Shah Jahan left Kabul on 25
Rabi‘II 1048/5 September 1638, he must have meant 25 Rabi‘II 1049, i.e., 25 August 1639.

195 Hammer, Histoire, IX, 310-37.
196 Muhammad Salih, Il, 324, and Lahauri, II, 193, give the totally different dates of 7 April and 22
May 1640 for his audience.

199

Imam Quli

members of his suite were treated with similar generosity. Three facts were meant to
give a clear indication of the Emperor's friendly feelings: Uzbeg Khwajah was only
kept four months in India, he saw Shah Jahan four times, and he was invited with the
Ottoman envoy to watch the illuminations organised by the former governor of

Qandahar, ‘Ali Mardan, on the river which flowed through the Shalamar gardens.!%”
When Uzbeg Khwajah left India on 1 Jumada 1/19 August 1640, he must have
felt satisfied with his mission, but he was disappointed to find, on his arrival in Balkh

in mid Ramadan/circa 29 December, that the khans did not share his optimism about
the future of their relations with Mughal India. They themselves had shown goodwill.
They had sent Shad Khan back early, on 10 Dhu ’!-hijja/2 April, surrendering to him
an impostor who had come to the khanate for support, claiming that he had a right to

the Mughal throne as the son of Shah Jahan's elder brother Khusrau.!98 Since then,
however, they had become highly suspicious of the Emperor's sincerity, and with
good reason. Firstly, they were concerned to hear that Shah Jahan was showing
unusual warmth to some of their former subjects, such as a son of Yalangtush Bi and

a nephew of Nadir diwanbegi Tughai, who had recently emigrated to India.!99
Secondly, they may have known of several letters exchanged between the
governor of Herat, and two major Mughal officials, the governor of Qandahar and the
Commander-in-Chief of the army, in which the idea of joint action against the
‘Uzbegs’ of the khanate was repeatedly mentioned.2°° One of these letters contained a
particularly sinister bit of information, namely that Shah Jahan intended to march to
Kabul with his son and then to send his son to undertake the conquest of
Badakhshan.?°! Even if these letters had not in fact come to the khans' attention, the
Emperor's plans had certainly become known to them during Uzbek Khwajah's stay
in India. First they were informed in late June 1640 that Shah Jahan's youngest son,
Murad Bakhsh, was on his way to Barbar with an army. They took immediate action
and, as they knew that they could rely on Yalangtish Bi, they despatched him to the
area with some hastily gathered troops. Their energetic response had the desired
effect, for, on hearing of Yalangtush's approach, the Prince quickly left Barbar,
allegedly to visit his father at Court.
Then in the autumn of 1640 a servant of Murad Bakhsh was apprehended in
Badakhshan, where he had been inciting the people to rebel. Once again Imam Quli
acted energetically against the Mughal threat. He gave orders for the man to be
brought to Bukhara, together with a local accomplice of the Qataghan tribe and, in an
attempt to deter other would-be rebels and infiltrators, he gave orders for their
tongues to be cut out, prior to their execution. He probably regretted at that stage that,
in April 1640, he had sent back the claimant to the Mughal throne with Shad
Khan.202
The khans determined to be on their guard in the future, but they continued to

197 Mahmid b. Wali (Ethé), 272a-b. Lahauri, II, 192, 193, 195-6, 199, 201, 205-6, 225.
Muhammad Salih, ‘Amal, II, 324, 326, 329.

198 |
ahauri, II, 210. Muhammad Salih, ‘Amal, Il, 332. In fact both of Khusrau's sons had been
killed in 1627. Mahmid b. Wali, 272b.
199 Lahauri, Il, 117, 205-6, 212, 213, 216, 230. Muhammad Salih, ‘Amal, II, 329.
200 The Iranian was Hasan Khan Shamli. The others were Qalij (Qilij) Khan and Asaf Khan.

201 Anon., A collection of letters, 76a-78b, 79b-83a. Muhammad Salih, Bahdr-i sukhian, BL Or.
178, 36a-40b, 45b-51a. Riazul Islam, A Calendar, I, 262-74.

202 Mahmiid b.Wali (Ethé), 273a-b. Lahauri, II, 210.

200

1611-41

keep up a semblance of amity with Shah Jahan, for it was just possible that Murad
Bakhsh had acted on his own initiative and without consulting his father. Imam Quli
therefore sent a minor official, the garawil (guard) Mu’min Bik to the Emperor's
Court, from whence he was dismissed in November 1640, and some time later Nadir

Muhammad despatched the supervisor of his kitchen, the bagawal Ibrahim, to Shah
Jahan, with a falcon and 14 different types of hawks.293
Shah Jahan tried similarly to persuade the khans of the sincerity of his newlyfound regard for them. He welcomed the various envoys from the khanate who
reached India in 1640-1 and also sent an ambassador of his own to Bukhara. The
baqawul Ibrahim, who arrived on 9 Dhi ’1-hijja 1050/23 March 1641, was dismissed
only 5 weeks later, on 6 May, with a rich robe, a horse and 5,000 rupees. His
companion was given 4,000 rupees, and although the dastarkhanchi Salih was kept

much longer, he too was well treated,2 as was the envoy of Nadir diwanbegi.29
The envoy whom Shah Jahan sent to Bukhara was none other than Mir Birkah,
who had done such excellent work in establishing Mughal-Ashtarkhanid relations
during Jahangir's reign. The dates of Mir Birkah's despatch and return are not clearly
established, but he appears to have set off some time after Uzbeg Khwajah was sent
back. He probably arrived in Balkh in early February 1641 and stayed there till about
June, long enough to witness the difficulties which arose in the khanate after Imam

Quli lost his sight.2%
While their envoys were being entertained in India the khans were experiencing
many difficulties, both within the khanate and abroad. To begin with, in the spring of
1640 the Qirghiz had attacked Kulab, and the area was unsettled for two whole
months. Later that same year, a harsh cold spell caused many deaths, which led to
disaffection among the people of the khanate, and perhaps also to the Badakhshan
rebellion which Murad Bakhsh's agents helped to foster. In addition to this a minor
rebellion broke out in the area of Andijan in October 1640.207
Outside the khanate the Qalm4q had cut the route to Muscovy. Their attacks on
travellers and particularly on traders were such that Nadir Muhammad wrote to the
Tsar circa August 1640 to suggest joint military action against them. He promised to
send Yalangtish, plus 12 amirs and 50,000 troops as his contribution to the

203 [ahauri, II, 217, 227.
204 Lahauri, II, 227, 230. Muhammad Salih, ‘Amal, II, 324, 337. Salih dastirkhanchi was still in
India on 19 Shawwal 1050/1 February 1641, some nine months after his arrival.
205 See above for the gifts received by these two envoys. Lahauri, II, 225 and Muhammad Salih,

‘Amal, II, 338, both appear to believe that Imam Quli's uncle himself came on a mission to the
Emperor, but this seems highly unlikely, for he was a very important personage, and he would
have been treated with particular honour and ceremony if he had come to India.

206 Muhammad Salih, ‘Amal, II, 346, says he was sent off with Uzbeg Khwajah (August 1640) but
if this was so, he took longer en route, as Mahmiid b.Wali (Ethé, 274a) makes no mention of
him when recording Uzbeg Khwajah's arrival on 29 December 1640, or at any time before the
end of January 1641, when he ends his account of events in the khanate. Lahauri, IT, 251, places
his despatch 3 months later than Muhammad Salih, in Sha'ban/November 1640, and, like him,

appears to believe that Mir Birkah witnessed Imam Quli's abdication and departure on pilgrimage
in November 1641. This is hardly likely, however, for, according to Muhammad Salih (344,
346, 347), Mir Birkah was back at Court in November 1641. In any case Lahauri (II, 229)
contradicts his own assumption by saying that Mir Birkah (was in India and) received a present
from the Emperor in April 1641!

207 Mahmiid b. Wali (Ethé), 272b-3a.

201

Imam Quli

campaign,208 and according to Khwajah Ibrahim, who delivered Nadir Muhammad's
letter, the men were sent off there and then in readiness for action. But the letter
entrusted to Khwajah Ibrahim took nearly two years to reach Tsar Mikhail, and
perhaps because of this excessive delay the joint expedition did not materialise. The
hapless ambassador had an even more troublesome journey than in 1638. First he
was held up for about a year in Khiva because Abu ’1-Ghazi, who had returned from
exile in Iran and was determined to wrest power from Isfandiyar, was blockading the
town. Then, on leaving Khiva for Mangishlaq, he was robbed and ill-treated by his
Turkmen escort. And as will be seen he had more problems to face when he reached
Astrakhan in November 1641, having joined forces en route with an ambassador
from Imam Quli, Behbid Bahadur, who had also been delayed for many months in
Khiva.299
Interestingly enough Imam Quli had had the foresight to send another ambassador
to Tobol'sk at the same time as he despatched Behbiid Bahadur to Astrakhan. This
ambassador, who is mentioned in the Tobol'sk records as Khozziyan (Hajji Jan), had
a much easier journey. He arrived there on 7 July 1640 and created quite a stir,?1°
for not only did he have 100 camels loaded with goods and a suite of 200, but as
many as 37 men were needed to carry his gifts when he first met the voevoda. This so
impressed a contemporary chronicler that he remarked ‘no ambassador as grand as he
has visited Tobol'sk (ever) before ’.
Tsar Mikhail's reaction to this lavish embassy. however, was distinctly hostile.
Instead of being pleased by the khan's generosity, or impressed by his might, he was
incensed that an embassy of such magnitude should have been sent to Tobol'sk and
not to Moscow. As in the case of Chobak Balykov in 1623 he showed his displeasure
by refusing point blank to let Imam Quli have the items which he had hoped to get in
return. He also asked the local voevoda to convey a stern message from him to the
khan. Imam Quli was to be informed that if he expected the Tsar's good favour and
love, and hoped for his envoys to be ‘protected’ during their stay, he should send
them to Moscow. As for the gifts required, which were gerfalcons and sables, they
were simply ‘not suitable’. Such gifts were only given to rulers who ‘humbly
petitioned’ for them (in Moscow).
Worse still, the voevoda was instructed to dismiss Khozziyan and to return all his

gifts, an offensive response to the Bukharan embassy which was only slightly
tempered by two concessions which Tsar Mikhail added as an afterthought.
Khozziyan was permitted to sell his goods in Tobol'sk, and the voevoda was ordered
to give him woollen cloth for his ruler to the value of the gifts sent, ‘and according to
previous practice’. The first concession may well have helped to soothe the khan's
ruffled feelings, but there is little likelihood that the second came to anything, for the
voevoda and his colleagues wrote to explain that it had placed them in a quandary.
Not only was there no good quality woollen cloth available in Tobol'sk at the time,
but the only previously recorded embassy from Bukhara to Tobol'sk had been that of

208 According to the transcription of this letter (Materialy, 154) Nadir Muhammad was preparing to
send pyat'sodesyat' thousand men, the word in italics probably to be read as pyat'desyat (50),
and not as pyat'sot (500).

209 Materialy, 152, 424-6, 169-70, 154-5, 161.
210 Novikov, Drevnyaya Rosstiskaya vivliofika, I, 164. The date given here is 25 June O.S.

202

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Chobak Balykov, and he had been sent back in 1623 without a single gift!2!!
It is not known how or when the matter was finally resolved, but by the time
Khozziyan returned to the khanate Imam Quli had probably abdicated. The message
he took back, however, was certainly delivered and heeded by Imam Quli's
successors, for the unfortunate error in etiquette was never repeated, the ultimate
destination of allsubsequent embassies from the khanate being Moscow, even when,
for safety reasons, the ambassador was sent there via Siberia.

Meanwhile it seems that the Qalmagq attacked Balkh in 1640.2!2 Nothing is known
about the scale or success of this operation, which was probably undertaken by the
Torgouts. However, it is interesting to note that in that year the khans were on good
terms with the Sungar Qalmagq, and in particular with Batur, who had assumed the
title of overall ruler or kuntaidzhi in 1635 and had been recognised as such since the
death of the previous holder of this title, the Derbet Dalai, in 1637. Indeed an

ambassador from Bukhara and an envoy from the Qazaq Prince Jahangir were both
noticed by a Muscovite ambassador during his stay in Batur's capital, Kubak Sary, in

September 1640.23
The year 1641 was to be a momentous year for the khanate, for it witnessed the
first of many abdications by an Ashtarkhanid monarch. The reason for Imam Quli's
abdication is widely known: the khan lost his sight as a result of severe ophthalmia
and, since a blind monarch is unfit to rule according to Muslim law, he decided to

abdicate in favour of his brother. His decision being generally unpopular, it was some
months before the transfer could take place, but the process was viewed with great
interest by the many monarchs with whom he was in contact.
Imam Quli's relations with Shah Jahan were ostensibly good, minor embassies
having been sent to India in 1640, but there appears to have been no contact with the
other major Sunni ruler, the Ottoman Sultan. Two reasons may be advanced for this.
Firstly, the new Ottoman ruler, Ibrahim, was not interested in such matters as foreign
relations. His main concern was rather to avoid illness with the help of his
astrologers, in order to devote himself to extravagant pleasures and to
womanising.2!4Secondly, the Ottomans no longer required an ally who would attack
Iran from the east in support of a so-called ‘holy war’ which would enlarge Turkey at
the expense of the Safawids. They were fully satisfied for the moment with Murad
IV's conquest of Baghdad and with their subsequent peace treaty with Iran.215
Nearer home, relations with Khwarazm were not satisfactory. Abu ’1-Ghazi was

hostile and a potentially dangerous foe. He had succeeded in blockading Khiva for
several months, and because he could count on the support of the Qalmaq of
Mangishlag who controlled the route to the Caspian, he would be able to interfere
211 TsGADA, fond 109, op.1, 1639 no.1, listy 8-10. See above for Chobak Balykov's embassy.
212 Bogoyavlenskii, "Materialy", 78. This is not mentioned by Mahmid b. Wali.
213 ZJatkin, Istoriya, 197. Russko-kitaiskie otnosheniya, I, 548. The presence of an envoy from
Jahangir at that time is particularly interesting for it is generally assumed that a state of war had
existed ever since the Qazaq Prince escaped from Batur's encampment where he was held captive
for a few months in either 1634 or 1635. Materialy po istorii russko-mongol'skikh otnoshenii,
I, 278, 280, 301. Howorth, I, 617. Kubak Sary was situated north of Yamysh lake.
214 Hammer, Histoire, IX, 384, 386. His predecessor, Murad IV, who died in February 1640, aged

29, although a tyrant ‘dévoré de la soif de I'or et de la soif du sang’, had at least shown himself
capable on the battlefield.

215 Thid., X, 135-7.

203

Imam Quli

with the passage of Bukharans to Muscovy, and Muscovites to the khanate.
Isfandiyar was keen to secure Imam Quli's co-operation in dealing with the
Qalmagq, but he was not well-disposed towards Imam Quli and his brother. Thus
when he sent two envoys of his own, Nazar Malik and Amin Bahadur, to Muscovy in
March and August 1641, he kept the envoys from the khanate behind in Khiva for
several months. This was allegedly done out of concern for their safety because the
route to the Caspian was still unsafe. But when he at last sent them on their way he
apparently tried to arrange for a group of Turkmen to kill them, or so Khwajah
Ibrahim was told.2!6 In fact Isfandiyar was determined to exercise his control over
future Bukharo-Muscovite relations. He wanted to persuade the Tsar, either to give
up the Bukharan connection altogether, or else to grant him a large share of the profits
that might accrue from the Bukharan trade. That was why, when he despatched Nazar
Malik to Astrakhan, he sent with him the letters which the envoys of Bukhara and
Balkh had intended to deliver there themselves. At the same time, true to his selfappointed role as go-between, Isfandiyar sent a strongly-worded letter to Astrakhan
voevoda Nikita Odoevskii, accusing him of sending an inadequate number of busa to
Karagan, far too late in the season. He complained that this had resulted in the two
ambassadors being stranded in Khiva, together with a number of merchants from the
khanate, Khwarazm and even Muscovy. The answer, he said, was to send as many
as four busa as soon as the ice melted on the Caspian. If Odoevskii failed to do so he
would be reported to the Tsar, who would be told that his inefficiency and delays

were to blame for the closure of the route.2!7
The voevoda responded as expected by sending the required number of busa to
Karagan, but, well before these boats conveyed Khwajah Ibrahim and Behbud
Bahadur to Astrakhan, a Muscovite ambassador had sailed in the opposite direction,
making for Bukhara via Khiva. Despite his unpleasant response to ambassador
Khozziyan, or perhaps in order to mitigate its effect, Tsar Mikhail had decided at last
to send another embassy to Bukhara, the first in 20 years. Perhaps he felt that Imam
Quli had been sufficiently punished for the difficulties which Khokhlov had
experienced in 1621 and that, in any event, a belated response to the last five
embassies from the khanate could in no way tarnish his honour.2!8 More to the point,
he was concerned about the recent interruption in trade with the khanate, for it had
adversely affected his Treasury. It suited him therefore to re-establish friendly
relations with Imam Quli.
He was also worried about his country's loss of manpower to the slave markets
of Bukhara, and he was anxious to know about the khanate's military potential and
about the khan's future intentions. He told his ambassador, Anisim Gribov, that the
main purpose of his mission was to have the Muscovite slaves in the khanate
released. Gribov was to explain to Isfandiyar of Khiva and to Imam Quli that such a
release would secure them ‘the Tsar's love’ and he was given detailed instructions on
how to obtain adequate transport for such men as might be released. He was
instructed to obtain as much information as possible about the strength of the
Bukharan army, the khanate's relations with Georgia and Khwarazm, and above all
216 Materialy, 426.

217 Materialy, 424-5, 167, 155-6.
218 Khwajah Ibrahim's first abortive embassy is not included among the five embassies in question
because the Tsar had not realised then that Nadir Muhammad was Imam Quli's brother.

204

1611-41

Bukharo-Ottoman relations. At a time when Tsar Mikhail feared an Ottoman attack in
retaliation for the capture and retention of Azov by the Cossacks, who had since given
the town to him, he was particularly keen that Bukhara should not support Istanbul
against Muscovy.
Anisim Gribov, had been carefully selected for this mission. As he had often been
to Central Asia before, he knew the local languages and would be able to find out
what the Tsar wanted to know. He was himself a trader and would have no difficulty

in investigating the trading potential of the khanate.2!9
When Gribov set off on his mission in the spring of 1641 the khanate happened to
be at peace with Iran and with the Qalmaq. Although Yalangtish Bi is known to have
collected an army in February 1641 in preparation for an expedition to Khurasan, this
expedition does not appear to have come to anything, perhaps because the amir was

sent instead to deal with local rebellions in Badakhshan and Tashkent.22° Peace with
the Qalmaq was similarly due to chance. According to a Muscovite national who was
then a captive at one of the Qalmaq encampments, two of their Princes, Daichin and
Ho Urluk,”?! had in fact suggested a raid on Bukhara that spring, but their suggestion
had been rejected by the others. Instead they had taken up the idea of attacking the
Muscovite settlement of Turinsk in Siberia with the help of Kuchum's descendant,
Devlet (Daulat) Girei, which the Torgout Prince Elden had put forward as an

alternative.22 The voevody of Turinsk, Ufa, Verkhotur'e and other towns were all
told to prepare their defences, but it is not clear when or where the attack took place.
In the meantime, Qalmaq policy towards Bukhara changed and, instead of raiding the
khanate the Derbet Prince Daichin seems to have organised a joint trade mission to
China in 1641, which travelled via Bukhara, Samarqand and Tashkent to Sinin and

was back in the khanate in spring 1642.223
But to return to the internal crisis of the khanate. In the absence of any detailed
and unbiased contemporary report, its development is unclear and several questions
arise. When did Imam Quli accept that his condition was so serious that he would
have to abdicate, why were the Bukharans so determined to prevent Nadir
Muhammad's accession, and what events led to the abdication? The answer to the
first question is that Imam Quli probably lost his sight in May 1641, for by late June
1641 Shah Safi was informed hat the khan was on his way to Marw, having

219 TsGADA, fond 134, op.1, 1641 no.2, listy 3, 127, 129, 139. Pares, 201. Riasanovsky, 195.
Preobrazhenskii, 272.

220 Muhammad Ma‘sim, 285, 290. That there was trouble in Badakhshan is assumed from the
arrival in Isfahan on 1 December 1641 of a Badakhshani Prince called Jalal al-Din who had fled
from captivity in the khanate and who was received ‘with great joy’ by the Shah. Materialy,
304. Yalangtash Bi was sent to pacify Tashkent and other towns some time in 1641 and he was
there just before Imam Quli abdicated.

221 It is not clear whether the Daichin in question was a Torgout, in which case he was Ho Urluk's
son. There was another Prince of the same name who was from the Derbet tribe and whose
father, Dalai, had been the kuntaidzhi (the overall ruler of the Qalmagq).

222 Miller, Il, 480.
223 Materialy

istorii

russko-mongol'skikh

otnoshenii, Il, 229-30. Russko-kitaiskie

otnosheniya, I, 120, 540. Demidova, "O datirovke", 166-7. The editors of these works take this
Daichin to be the Torgout Prince, but they offer no reason for their choice. It seems more likely
that this was in fact the Derbet of the same name, for he is said here to have camped east of
Tomsk, whereas the Torgouts tended to camp nearer to the Volga and to the Ishim.

Bogoyavlenskii, "Materialy", 77-79, 98.

205

Imam Quli

abdicated and left the khanate.224 The reasons for Nadir Muhammad's unpopularity
with the Bukharans seem clear enough, even in biased accounts by Mughal historians
such as Lahauri, whose aim was to present him as a monster of greed and unbrotherly
feeling.225 The nobles and amirs of Bukhara were afraid that he would exercise a
tighter control on the economy, and that, in an effort to develop agriculture and to
increase the income of Ma wara’ al-nahr, he would not only insist on the proper
payment of taxes, but also take away some of their privileges.
Looking only to their own advantage, many of the khan's advisers wished Imam

Quli to stay, for his laisser-faire policy and his gifts of tax-free land had enriched
them, although they had helped to impoverish the country. They ignored the problems
which the khan's constant devaluation of the currency caused for tax-payers and
traders, as did his repeated issues of new coins of ever-decreasing silver content.
These coins, which were used to pay the salaries of officials and troops, were often
refused on the market-place, and yet they alone could be used for tax purposes, and
they often had to be acquired in exchange for coins of higher intrinsic value, which
had automatically lost 10 per cent of their value on being declared ‘old’ .226
Those amirs who had a vested interest in maintaining the status quo tried hard to
persuade Imam Quli not to abdicate. They argued, Lahauri tells us, that his sight
might still be restored to him, that since his wisdom was unimpaired, he could
continue to guide the affairs of state, and that they would gladly help him in this task.
They added that they would refuse to serve his brother while he was still alive, and
warned him that if he insisted on giving Nadir Muhammad the throne, the country
would split in two. In the circumstances Imam Quli decided not to rush things, and in
answer to Nadir Muhammad's offer of help, which Lahauri calls ‘deceitful and
disgraceful’, he wrote, ordering his brother to remain in Balkh until summoned.
Nadir Muhammad obeyed at first, but later he marched on Hisar and Samarqand in

order to force the issue.227
So much for Lahauri's version of events. In fact Nadir Muhammad's motives for
marching on Hisar seem to have been unimpeachable. The situation in the khanate had
seriously deteriorated by the summer of 1641, as can be seen from a letter which
Khwajah Ibrahim, Nadir Muhammad's ambassador, received from his mother while

he was on his way to Muscovy. She informed him that Imam Quli had lost his sight
and that Yalangtish Bi had gone to Bukhara from Tashkent. On hearing this, Nadir
Muhammad considered the idea of sending an envoy to Bukhara, but later decided to

go there himself.228 It is hardly surprising that Nadir Muhammad should have been
concerned about the reported conduct of Yalangtish Bi. He was one of the wealthiest
and most powerful amirs in the khanate and six years earlier he had completed the
building of a grandiose medresseh in the very heart of Samarqand. Since Yalangtish
had presumably been sent to Tashkent to deal with unrest in the area, as in the past,
his sudden change of plan and departure for Bukhara could be taken to mean that he
had decided to flout the khan's orders and to take a major part in the succession
struggle.
224 Muhammad Ma‘sim, 288.
225 See further about their motives in Burton, "Nadir Muhammad".

226 Lahauri, II, 542-3. Davidovich, Istoriya, 20-34, 92, 99, 132-3.

227 | ahauri, II, 252-4.
228 Materialy, 304.

206

1611-41

At that time some of Nadir Muhammad's enemies were trying to put forward a
certain Sufi Sultan as a more suitable candidate for the throne. This Ashtarkhanid
Prince was distantly related to Imam Quli, but his sponsors may have hoped for
Iranian support if his older brother was indeed the Muhammad Ibrahim who ruled

Balkh forty years earlier under Shah ‘Abbas' aegis.22° In fact, however, his claim
was weaker than that of Wali Muhammad's

son, Rustam Muhammad,

who was

living in Iran and Shah Safi therefore felt little sympathy for their cause. When he was
told on 1 Jumada II/7 September that ‘the amirs of Bukhara had placed Sifi Sultan on
the throne’, he decided to take action on behalf of Rustam Muhammad. A month later

he issued orders for an army to be gathered and to prepare for an expedition to
Khurasan (and also, presumably, the khanate) which would be led by Rustam
Muhammad Khan as Commander-in-chief.23°
Meanwhile, according to Khwajah Ibrahim's mother, Yalangtish Bi had made up
his mind to support Nadir Muhammad and had written urging him to hurry to
Bukhara. Imam Quli had also taken a major decision: he would no longer wait for the
amirs of Bukhara to come round to his way of thinking. He would force them to
accept his brother as their next ruler. And this, according to Hajji Mir, is how he did
it. He went to Samargand and asked his brother to join him there as soon as possible,
so that they might pray together at the tomb of the great fifteenth century Sufi,
Khwajah Ahrar. Nadir Muhammad was specifically advised to go to Samarqand via
Hisar, which he took as a hint that it was important for him to secure this town. He
sent ahead, therefore, his son ‘Abd al-‘Aziz, together with ‘Abd al-Rahman Ushin

who had regained his favour after an earlier suspicion of embezzlement, and who had
been given the title of diwanbegi.23! They forcefully negotiated with the hostile
governor, Daulat Bi Kinkas and he finally agreed ‘to submit’, i.e., to accept Nadir
Muhammad's proposed accession. His submission at once persuaded Baqi Bi Yuz,
who was destined in the future to play a deciding rdle in the khanate, to follow suit,
and he went over with his father to offer his allegiance to Nadir Muhammad. The
other amirs, who had prepared to fight the khan's nomination, also climbed down
after hearing that Hisar had surrendered. However, they seem to have been more
reluctant than Baqi Bi Yiz. For, according to Hajji Mir, it was ‘by order of the khan’
that they went to meet Nadir Muhammad, ‘kiss his stirrup’ and wait upon him, at all
the stages between Shahr-i sabz and Samarqand.
Lahauri's version of the gradual rallying of the amirs to Nadir Muhammad is
slightly different. According to this, when the amirs realised that Hisar had
surrendered and that Imam Quli was determined that his brother should succeed him,

they sent no less a person than his recent ambassador to India, Uzbeg Khwajah, to
Nadir Muhammad, with a carefully-worded letter in which they explained that they
had only held out against him out of loyalty to his brother. Encouraged by their
message and by a letter from Imam Quli who urged him to hurry over before he
himself left for the Hijaz, Nadir Muhammad made for Samargand via Shahr-i sabz.

229 Lahauri, II, 447, and Hajji Mir, 208b, both say that he was the son of Tursin (Muhammad)
Sultan, half-brother of Imam Quli's grandfather, Jani Bik. And according to Hajji Mir (157a),
who was himself an Ashtarkhanid Prince, the Muhammad Ibrahim who ruled Balkh briefly was
also a son of Tursin Muhammad Sultan.

230 Materialy, 303-4. Muhammad Ma‘sim, 289-90. Bijan Ta’rikh, 78a.
231 Yajji Mir, 199b-200b. Lahauri, II, 437, says ‘Abd al-Rahman was only named diwanbegi after
Nadir Muhammad's accession.

207

Imam Quli

Both Lahauri and Hajji Mir agree that Imam Quli's uncle Nadir diwanbegi Tughai,
Baqi Bi Yuz and the influential Nadr Allah Bi Baruti were among the amirs who went
forward to meet Nadir Muhammad on his way to Samargand. And according to
Lahauri, on 4 Sha‘ban/8 November Nadir Muhammad met his brother in Samarqand
by Khwajah Ahrar's grave, as arranged. Two days later the khutbah was read in his
name during the Friday prayer, and this, according to Hajji Mir, was done at Imam

Quli's request.232
The crisis was over. Imam Quli now went back to Bukhara. He threw a banquet
during which he distributed gifts to all the grandees of the realm and gave his brother
most of his possessions, including a precious bejewelled belt said to have come down

from Genghis Khan.?33 Within a month he had left the khanate for Mecca, where he
had decided to end his days.234
Imam Quli travelled via Qarakil and Chahar Jay to Marw where he appears to
have stayed several months,?35 enjoying the hospitality of Murtada Quli and praying

at the numerous graves of holy men of the area. He had a suite of at least 200,736
which included his uncle, Nadir diwanbegi, together with officials, nobles and less
prominent people. The size of his suite has generally been taken to demonstrate his
subjects' love for him, as well as their reluctance to accept his brother as ruler.
However, it is more likely that many of them simply wanted to go on pilgrimage and
that they hoped, by travelling with a person of such high standing, to receive better
treatment in Iran than was usually granted to pilgrims from the khanate.
A few words should be said here about the many allegations of cruel and
inconsiderate conduct which have been levelled at Nadir Muhammad in connection
with his brother's departure from the khanate. Thus, it has been claimed that Imam
Quli asked to travel though Mughal India but was compelled by his brother to travel

through the domains of the Shi‘a ruler.237 This cannot be correct for Imam Quli was
well aware of Shah Jahan's hostility towards the khanate, and would not have wanted
to travel through his dominions. He probably thought that he would be just as safe, if
not safer, in Iran, where he could at least count on the gratitude of his former
prisoner, the governor of Marw, Murtada Quli, whom he had treated most generously
ten years earlier. The pious khan may have also wished to take advantage of this
journey in order to pray, as he did at length, at the many shrines of Khurasan.
It has also been said that Imam Quli was not allowed to take his wife, Ay

232 Lahauri, II, 254-5. Hajji Mir, 200b-201b. Both these historians give Friday 6 Sha‘ban as the
date of Nadir Muhammad's official proclamation, but according to Wiistenfeld's tables 6 Sha‘ban
was a Sunday, so that the actual date on which the khutbah was first read in his name was either
4 Sha‘ban/8 November or 11 Sha‘ban/15 November.

233 Lahauri, II, 256, claims that the belt was actually taken from Imam Quli by order of Nadir

Muhammad after he had left the khanate, but this seems to be untrue. See more about the
Mughal campaign to vilify Nadir Muhammad in Burton, "Nadir".

234 Hajji Mir, 202a, places his departure several months later, on 24 Dha ’1-hijja/26 March 1642,

but this cannot be correct, for, according to Muhammad Ma’sim's chronological account of
events (290), the governor of Marw wrote to the Shah on 21 Ramadan 1041/24 December 1641

to report Imam Quli's arrival in his town.

235 He arrived in December 1641 and presumably stayed there until he left for Mashhad which he
reached in May 1642.

236 Abii ’l-Qasim, Nuskha, 258b. In a letter to the governor of Marw Imam Quli wrote that he had a
suite of 200. Hajji Mir, 202a, says he had a suite of 500.

237 Lahauri, II, 255. Muhammad Salih, ‘Amal, II, 346-7.
208

1611-41

Khanum, with him and that he was robbed on his way by order of Nadir Muhammad.
The truth of the first allegation, made only by Mughal historians, cannot be
confirmed, but as for the second it seems to be pure fabrication, and may have sprung
from his contemporaries’ surprise at the simple way in which Imam Quli travelled.
This should not have caused surprise for the khan was travelling as a pilgrim and
would have dressed accordingly. In any case he had always lived unpretentiously, as
testified by Muscovite ambassador Khokhlov, who was taken aback by the modest
scale of the audience he was granted, and by the khan's throne, ‘a plain stool made of
wood, covered by a piece of material’. This was so not only because Imam Quli was
little able to afford luxuries, owing to his almost chronic lack of money, but because
he made a practice of giving away at least some of the gifts he received, in order to

show his greatness, as well as his contempt for material things.238
To return to the allegation that he was robbed on his way to Iran by order of Nadir
Muhammaag, it is difficult to see how this could have come about, for not only did the

brothers part with the greatest affection outside Bukhara,”? but the new khaqan even
sent three separate envoys to Marw and Kashan to announce that his brother was on
his way.
Two of these ambassadors were sent to the Shah in Kashan. The first one, the
ataliq Muhammad Yusuf, saw Shah Safi in Kashan before 6 April 1642. The second
arrived there in May and, like Muhammad Yisuf, he carried a letter in which Nadir
Muhammad asked for compassion and kindness to be shown towards his brother.
Nadir Muhammad's intercession on his brother's behalf turned out to have been
unnecessary, for as soon as Shah Safi found out the truth about the situation in Ma
wara’ al-nahr, he shelved his plans for invasion and renounced all hostility towards
the khanate. On hearing in late December 1641 that Imam Quli was on his way to
Isfahan, he decided to treat him as an honoured guest, and as early as Dhu ’1qa‘da/February 1642, or well before the arrival of Nadir Muhammad's envoys, he
gave instructions for money and goods to be sent to the older monarch.24°
Nadir Muhammad's first envoy, Muhammad Yusuf, was well treated at the
Iranian Court. Shah Safi even invited him, together with the ambassadors from
Istanbul, Muscovy and India, to take part in a very large-scale hunt, the success of
which was subsequently marked by a gruesome tower, made up from the heads of the
animals which had been slain, and topped with the head of the architect who erected

the structure.24!
Shah Safi's friendly attitude towards the khanate was not disinterested. He was
on his way to retake Qandahar, and, having sent troops ahead towards Khurasan in
April, he was determined to secure either Nadir Muhammad's support, or at least his
benevolent neutrality. Shah Jahan was informed of Shah Safi's intentions in late
Muharram 1052/11 May 1642, and, hearing that the well-known Iranian amir,
Rustam Khan Qarji, was on his way with an army, he at once despatched Dara
238 |
ahauri, II, 256. Muhammad Tahir Wahid, ‘Abbasnama, 33-34. Khilkov, 399-400. Mahmad
b.Wali (Ethé), 253b, 269b, 272a.
239 Hajji Mir, 202b. Iskandar Beg, Dhail, 249.
240 Shah Safi was then 40 and Imam Quli was 51 or 52.
241 Aba ’1-Qasim, Nuskha, 263b. Muhammad Ma‘sim, 291. Bijan, 79a-b. Muhammad Yisuf
Walih, 136b-7a. Muhammad Tahir Wahid, ‘Abbdsndma, 20. Iskandar Beg, Dhail, 256, 250.
Tavernier, Les six voyages, I, iii, 429.

209

Imam Quli

Shikith to Qandahar with 37,000 men. Since this was likely to cause concern in the
khanate Dara Shikih sent an envoy called Mir ‘Aziz to the khanate with a letter in
which he presumably explained that this expedition was purely defensive and

intended to deal with the Iranian forces.242 At the same time, however, in case Nadir

Muhammad tried to support the Iranian monarch, Shah Jahan sent his son, Murad
Bakhsh, together with the former governor of Qandahar, ‘Ali Mardan, to join Dara
Shikih with instructions to take action, if necessary, against ‘the army of Turan’.
Shah Jahan's careful preparations came to nothing, for in the event the Iranian
campaign was called off when Shah Safi suddenly died in May 1642. The Emperor
therefore recalled his troops. As for Nadir Muhammad, he made no attempt to
intervene in the area, for he needed peace with India while he strengthened his hold
over the khanate. On the contrary, he even seems to have sent an envoy to Shah
Jahan, for a certain Mu’min Bi from Balkh, who was related to Uzbeg Khwajah,

arrived in India in June 1642 and was received at Court. It is not known how long he
remained there or whether he delivered a letter to the Emperor. However, it seems
likely that he announced Nadir Muhammad's accession and asked for peaceful

relations with India.243
Shah Safi was followed on the throne by histen-year-old son ‘Abbas II. The new
Shah was proclaimed in Kashan on 16 Safar/16 May, a few days after his father's
death, and under the aegis of his powerful grand vizier and protector Sart Taqi, he
continued his father's policy with regard to Imam Quli and his brother. A welcoming
letter was sent to Imam Quli, expressing the Shah's delight on hearing that he had
visited the tomb of Imam Rida, and announcing that Iranian officials had been
instructed to look after him properly. As for Nadir Muhammad's ambassadors, the
second of whom had reached Kashan a few days after Shah Safi's death, they were
not held back. They were dismissed within three weeks of ‘Abbas II's accession and
an Iranian ambassador was sent with them to the khanate, a mark of courtesy that was
bound to please the new khaqan. He would have been less pleased, however, if he

had known that the day after his ambassadors were dismissed the young Shah went to
visit Wali Muhammad's son and showed him great favour.244 ‘Abbas II's advisers
were Clearly hoping to influence events in the khanate. They may have even planned
to emulate ‘Abbas I by choosing a khaqan who, like Muhammad Ibrahim, would
depend on the Shah for support.
However, despite this show of friendship for Rustam Muhammad Khan, the

Shah and his advisers made sure that Imam Quli was treated with the greatest courtesy
throughout his lengthy progress through Khurasan and Iran. As soon as it was heard
in late May 1642 that he had reached Mashhad, a senior official, the ishik aga bashi
Murtada Quli who was also the governor of Teheran, was sent to wait upon him and
to bring the former monarch to Qazwin. The Shah himself rode out to meet him about
seven miles from Qazwin, then he dismounted, as did Imam Quli, whereupon they
warmly embraced each other. After a day spent resting in a tent of velvet and gold, the
242 Muhammad Salih, ‘Amal, I, 501, says that Mir ‘Aziz was sent twice to Nadir Muhammad, the
second time being in 1646. No date is given for his first embassy, but this probably took place
in 1642, for circumstances then were very similar to those obtaining in 1639, when Dara Shikih
tried to allay any suspicions that Nadir Muhammad might have had regarding his troop
movements by sending an ambassador to Balkh.

243 Khafi Khan, I, 590. Lahauri, II, 295, 303.

244 Muhammad Yusuf Walih, 160b. Muhammad Tahir Wahid, ‘Abbdsnama, 20.

210

1611-41

two monarchs rode into town together, on a road covered with rich
materials. Similar

warmth and generosity were shown to Imam Quli throughout his stay. Banquets
were
organised in his honour, rich gifts were lavished upon the older man and the
Shah

even suggested that he should spend the remainder of that year in Iran.245 Imam Quli

appreciated the offer, but did not reconsider his decision. Determined to reach
Mecca
in good time for the hajj, he left Qazwin within a few days of arriving there, after
blessing ‘Abbas II's reign.246 He took with him an escort and a large sum of money,
plus enough food and fodder to see him to Baghdad. All of this had been provided by

his generous young host.247
He arrived safely at Mecca where he died two years later,248 remembered for his

detachment from material things and highly praised by all those who wished to vilify
his brother.

245 As mentioned above, Imam Quli was 51 or 52, but the Shah was only 10 years old.
246 According to Muhammad Ma’ sim (303-6), the Shah found out at the end of May that Imam
Quli had arrived in Mashhad. Bijan Ta’rikh, 81b-86a, says he arrived at Qazwin in June and only
spent two days there. Hajji Mir, 203a-b, gives no date for his arrival but says he only stayed a
few days in Qazwin. Muhammad Tahir Wahid, ‘Abbdsndma, 32-39, gives no precise date but
mentions that the zephyrs of spring were blowing when he arrived. Muhammad Yusuf Walih,
164a-6b, places his arrival in Mehr, i.e. September-October which would have given Imam Quli
only two months in which to get to Mecca for the hajj.
fer
247 If we are to credit Muhammad Ma’sim (306), he was given 7,000 tuman, i.e., the equivalent of

between 875,000 and one million tanga.

248 Hajji Mir, 203b.
211

7
Nadir Muhammad's

troubled reign

(1641-1651)

While Imam Quli was slowly making his way through Khurasan to Qazwin, his
envoy, Behbid Bahadur, was still in Astrakhan. He had arrived there in November
1641, together with Khwajah Ibrahim, and they were both awaiting permission to
continue to Moscow. Khwajah Ibrahim was in particular difficulties, for he had made
his way there under false pretences. When, at his third attempt he had at last boarded
the Muscovite busa in Mangishlaq, the captain had refused to take him to Astrakhan,
because he had no accrediting letters on him, these having been sent ahead with the
Khwarazmian envoy Nazar Malik. This was to have been expected, but Khwajah
Ibrahim refused to be left behind. Hearing that a party of Turkmen had arrived from
Khiva with the express intention of killing him, he decided to force the captain's hand
and he did so by forging a letter which described him as a trader, for he knew that
traders were always accepted on the busa. After arriving in Astrakhan and retrieving
the khan's letter and goods he told the truth, explaining that he was the ambassador
whose accrediting letters had been delivered by Nazar Malik. This confession did not
improve his case. The Tsar had decided some time earlier that, since there had been
no previous relations between Moscow and Balkh, no one from Balkh should be
allowed either to travel on the busa or to enter Astrakhan. The captain of the busa had
in fact received strict instructions to this effect before leaving for Manqishlaq and he
was now whipped for disobeying orders. Khwajah Ibrahim was in serious danger of
being expelled from the town, but Tsar Mikhail unexpectedly relented, for fear of
retaliations by the authorities of Bukhara and ‘Yurgench’ (Khwarazm) against
Muscovite traders and envoys.
Following this decision Khwajah Ibrahim was put up in a traders' hostel in the
new stone-built part of Astrakhan and he was told that in the spring he would be
allowed to go up the Volga to Moscow. He was given a daily drink allowance of 4
charki (0.8 pint) of wine and 10.5 pints of mead which he accepted, although he
refused to accept his much increased food allowance,! saying, as in January 1640,
that it was far too small. The exact date of Khwajah Ibrahim's departure from
Astrakhan is not known, although there is evidence to indicate that his first audience
in Moscow took place in November 1642. Tsar Mikhail was no doubt impressed by
the generous assortment of presents which he delivered on behalf of Nadir
Muhammad - 90 precious stones, 17 kettledrums, 17 assorted carpets and 77 pieces
of material, plus 2 sabres chased with gold and silver, a large tent, 2 bench covers, 2
amblers, 9 beaver hides, 9 snow-leopard hides and 9 rhinoceros horns. In order to
show his friendly disposition towards the khan, he did not detain Khwajah Ibrahim.
1 This was now 15 den'gi per day instead of 8.

1641-51

He sent him back shortly after his arrival, in May 1643, with a most gracious letter in
which he answered Nadir Muhammad fully. Tsar Mikhail promised to send an army
against the Qalmagq, as requested, and to provide gifts of gerfalcons and coats of
armour for the khan. He agreed to the establishment of friendly relations between
them. He would endeavour to trace and punish the murderers of Nadir Muhammad's
trading agent Khwajah Husain and his son, although the murder had occurred some
years earlier and would not be easy to solve. He would also try to recover Khwajah
Husain's possessions and slaves in order to send them back. He made it clear that his
own attitude was more than favourable to their trade between their countries. Not only
had he given Khwajah Ibrahim permission to buy all types of goods, he explained,
but, in order to secure Nadir Muhammad's love and friendship, he had also given
orders for the merchant who accompanied him to be exempted from the obligatory
Customs dues. Nadir Muhammad would be expected to reciprocate by establishing
friendly and loving relations with the Tsar, and also by agreeing to the suggestion that
free travel, as well as trade in all manner of goods, be permitted to the traders of both

countries.”
Meanwhile Nadir Muhammad had begun his reign as khaqan by trying to
reorganise the khanate on more practical and productive lines. First he checked land
titles carefully and reduced the holdings of tax-free lands whenever possible, which
made him rather unpopular. Then, in order to control the most powerful and
dangerous amirs while harnessing their support, he either attached them to his sons in
the capacity of ataliq or diwanbegi, or else he gave them positions of importance in
far-flung parts of the khanate. Thus he named Baqi Yiz to Tashkent as ataliq to his
third son Bahram and he sent Bik Ughli Kinkas to Samarqand to act as ‘Abd al“Aziz's ataliq. He was even more generous with regard to Nadr Bi Naiman, known as
Nadr Bi Baruti or ‘the bewhiskered one. This amir, who, according to Lahauri, was

among the last to accept his accession to the throne, was appointed sole governor of
Balkh, and his son was awarded an important position in Samarqand. The name of
the ataliq who was expected to help Nadir Muhammad's second son Khusrau to
govern Taliqgan and Badakhshan is not known, but Tardi ‘Ali Qataghan, who was
destined to play an important réle in the khanate after 1644, was given the position of
ataliq to Nadir Muhammad's fourth son, Subhan Quli. Together they were put in
charge of the frontier with India, and more specifically of Kahmard and the Hazarjat
tribes of the frontier region which, until then, had been under the control of
Yalangtish Bi. Yalangtish Bi does not appear to have been compensated for the loss
of his large landholdings in the area and, although he was given a position of great
responsibility in Bukhara,? he must have resented the cavalier treatment received at the
hands of the khan and the sudden curtailing of his zone of influence.
The positions of ataliq and diwanbegi, it should be added, were not mere
sinecures, for, in accordance with the policy which he had developed during his

brother's reign, Nadir Muhammad required his sons to visit him periodically and this
meant that the ataliq often had the sole responsibility for long periods of time. Thus
‘Abd al-‘Aziz, who had to spend about four months with his father in Bukhara and
Qarshi from late 1641, was summoned again in November 1642. Although most of
the first occasion was spent hunting, and on the second the Prince seems to have been

2 Materialy, 425-6, 170-3, 153-4, 180-2.
3 Lahauri, II, 438. TsGADA, fond 134, op.1, 1641 no.2, 132a-3a. He was ‘the first in the realm’
after Nadir Muhammad, and he seems to have been left in charge of the capital in the spring of
1643 when the khan was hunting in Qarshi.

Nadir Muhammad

required only to keep his father company during the month of the Fast, it is very
likely that Nadir Muhammad had an ulterior motive in asking him over. He wanted to
weaken his son's control over Samargand by taking him out of the area. He also
wanted to brief the young man and question him about the province, in order to
remind him that he only ruled Samarqand as his father's nominee.4
In the early spring of 1642 the people of Andijan wrote to Nadir Muhammad
complaining of an attack by the Qirghiz, and asking for a governor to be appointed.°
Nadir Muhammad wrote back, giving them permission to choose a governor for
themselves, and also sent the experienced and reliable amir, ‘Abd al-Rahman Bi
Ushin, © to Tashkent and the Qipchagq steppes with an army. “Abd al-Rahman was to
seek help in dealing with the Qirghiz from the virtually independent Qazaq Prince
Jahangir. He was also to negotiate a marriage between Jahangir's daughter and Nadir
Muhammad's son ‘Abd al-‘Aziz, because this would ensure Jahangir's co-operation
and reinforce his loyalty to the new khan. Although the Qazags had remained at peace
with the khanate since 1636 and had paid baj and kharaj to Imam Quli, as agreed, they
had probably not acknowledged Nadir Muhammad's authority as yet. They might
have even offered their support to the Qirghiz, and it was just as well to prevent such

;

a dangerous development.

‘Abd al-Rahman's mission was successful in that he secured the hand of Qazaq
Khanum for ‘Abd al-‘Aziz and, with the help of the Qazaq army, he defeated the
Qirghiz and killed at least some of their leaders.” But the area was not completely
pacified, and he had to remain there several months to complete the task.
Meanwhile Nadir Muhammad, who since his accession had carefully timed his
visits to Bukhara and Balkh in order to take advantage of local weather conditions,
left Qarshi at the end of the hunting-season to spend the summer and early autumn of
1642 in Balkh. From there he kept a wary eye on the situation developing in
Khwarazm, where Isfandiyar had died that spring, to be replaced by his son
Yashan.® He was concerned that the new ruler might make things difficult for
travellers and ambassadors on their way to Muscovy by detaining them, as Isfandiyar
had done in 1640-1. On the other hand if Yashan was toppled by his uncle Abi ’1Ghazi, as was likely, then without doubt the khanate's trade with Muscovy would be
interrrupted.
4 Lahauri, II, 436-9, 435. Hajji Mir, 204b-5a, gives no names for the ataliqs appointed to three of
Nadir Muhammad's sons, namely Khusrau, Qutluq Muhammad and ‘Abd al-Rahman, perhaps
because the areas entrusted to these Princes (Qunduz, Hisar Shadman and Shiburghan) were not of
major importance and the officials appointed would not have been chosen from among the major

amirs.
5 Muhammad Salih, ‘Amal, II, 437. Lahauri, II, 437, writes instead that they wanted a replacement
for their governor (unnamed), who was ‘placing the hand of oppression on the collar of the poor’.
6 Hajji Mir, 209b. Lahauri, II, 437, 446. Although the name Ushin is not given here, it is assumed

that this was in fact ‘Abd al-Rahman Ushin and that he was also the amir who subsequently earned
the hatred of Nadir Muhammad's enemies because of his excessive devotion to the khan.
7 According to Lahauri, II, 437, their chief, Qutluq Sayyid and 10 amirs were enticed over by
treachery and killed. Muhammad Salih, ‘Amal, II, 437, merely says Qutluq Muhammad was taken

by ruse. Hajji Mir, 209b-10a, only agrees that one of the Qirghiz amirs was killed and that the

combined Uzbeg and Qazaq troops won the day against them.
8 Aba ’l-Ghazi, tr. 338, text 316, says Isfandiyar died in the Year of the Horse 1051-2/or after March
1642. TsGADA, fond 134, op. 1, 1641 no.2, list 87. Gribov was informed of Isfandiyar's death in
June 1642 and calls his successor Seit. According to Veselovskii ("Priem", 88), Seit is not a
name, rather a mispronunciation of sayyid, which was Yashan's honorary title. Hajji Mir, 275b,

says Isfandiyar died in 1052 or before 22 March 1643.

214

1641-51

In the circumstances it seemed advisable to develop good relations with the
Qalmagq who controlled most of the alternative routes to Siberia and to Astrakhan.?

The Derbet Daichin was certainly awake to the trading possibilities of the khanate, for
he sent trade missions to Bukhara in 1641 and 1642.!° As for the Torgout Louzan,
who camped between the Yaik and the Emba, he had continued to be friendly. In
1642 he appears to have sent an ambassador to Nadir Muhammad who delivered a
very special gift. This was a young slave-boy of Muscovite origin, who, some 30
years later, would ably represent the interests of his country of adoption as the
Bukharan ambassador to Muscovy. Nadir Muhammad was so pleased with this gift
that he sent a return

embassy

in 1644, and his ambassador,

Mambet

Murat

(Muhammad Murad), bought another slave for him while at Louzan's encampment.!!
The improvement which had taken place in relations with the Qalmaq since 1640
augured well for the future of Bukharo-Muscovite relations. However, other parts of
the route between the two countries had become unsafe. As a result ambassador
Gribov had a very difficult journey to Bukhara where he arrived circa 15 January
1643, after losing his fellow-ambassador, Savin Gorokhov, who fell ill and died at

Kabakli. The Turkmen of Mangishlaq having proved unhelpful, suspicious and
greedy, it had taken him nearly 6 months, instead of the usual three weeks, to go
from Kabakli to Urganj. In Khwarazm he had been denied the usual food allowance
at the beginning of his stay. And when he left for the khanate Yushan had refused to
give him the food, carts and escort which he needed for the journey. Clearly the
attitude of the Turkmen and of Yushan would have to change before Nadir
Muhammad could hope to develop his trade and diplomatic relations with Muscovy.
However, although it suited Nadir Muhammad to establish good relations with
Muscovy, he was surprisingly offhand with Gribov. He flatly refused the
ambassador's request for food, horses and an escort to be sent three miles out of
Bukhara, so that he could make a ceremonial entrance into the capital. Yalangtish told
Gribov's interpreter that this would simply be contrary to precedent. When Gribov
entered the town, although a special official (a mehmandar) was detailed to look after
him, no food was sent, and he was told that, in accordance with a custom of many

years’ standing, no food would be supplied to him before his first audience.!> The
audience was equally disappointing. Nadir Muhammad broke the strict rules of
Muscovite etiquette by failing to ask about the Tsar's health. Worse still, he remained
seated when the Tsar's august letter was handed to him. And when Gribov mentioned
the Muscovite captives held in his realm, he only agreed to let go those who had
worked off their bondage and had already been manumitted, provided that they had
their papers in order and that they wished to return to the Orthodox faith. As for those
captives who were not yet free, Nadir Muhammad professed himself unable to release
them, giving his reasons as follows: - they were living at their masters’, they had
9 See a full description of these routes below.
10 See above for the reasons establishing that the Daichin in question was probably a Derbet Prince.

11 Yaterialy, 219, 200. The boy was originally from Astrakhan. When he was sent to Muscovy in
1675 as Hajji Farrukh, he told Muscovite officials that he had lived 3 years at Nadir Muhammad's
Court ‘until he died (i.e. was toppled) and was replaced by his son’. If the ambassador's reckoning
was correct he must have arrived in Bukhara in 1642 because Nadir Muhammad was replaced by

his son in 1645. However, if Hajji Farrukh was captured during Louzan's known attack on
Astrakhan of February 1643 (Bogoyavlenskii, Materialy, 79-80), then he must have arrived in
Bukhara a year later and only lived two years at Nadir Muhammad's Court.
12 TsGADA, fond 134, op.1, 1641 no.2, listy 86, 92-106, 120-2.

13 [pid., 121-4. This certainly had not been the case when Khokhlov arrived in the khanate in 1621.

215

Nadir Muhammad

been expensive to buy, they had not worked off their bondage, and (ast but not least)
they had become Muslims.!4
Gribov refused to be discouraged. Determined to secure the release of all the
Muscovite slaves, he approached Yalangtish Bi, the mihtar and two of the khan's
religious advisers to this end, distributing a number of sables to them in order to enlist
their aid.!5They readily agreed to help secure the release of all Muscovite slaves, but
soon Gribov found himself the butt of Nadir Muhammad's displeasure. There were
two reasons for the khan's hostility. The first, as explained to Gribov by one of the
Muscovite captives, was that Nadir Muhammad believed him to have come as a spy.
This was probably because the Muscovite authorities had recently allowed the
building of a palisaded town at Gur'ev, near the mouth of the Yaik, which Nadir
Muhammad took to be the first step in a campaign of expansion into Central Asia.!®
The second reason was one of honour. Nadir Muhammad had found out that Gribov
had presented Yashan with eight gerfalcons and had only given him four. This was
an intolerable insult for it implied that the Tsar had a greater regard for the new ruler
of Khwarazm, although in fact Ma wara’ al-nahr had always enjoyed a higher
standing than the neighbouring khanate, as one of Nadir Muhammad's close advisers

explained to Gribov. In any case Nadir Muhammad was older than Yushan and he
needed valuable gifts in order to cement the loyalty of his amirs.
Gribov did his best to put matters right by explaining that the birds had been taken
to Seit/Yashan because they had been requested (a long time earlier) as a wedding
present by Yushan's father. In contrast, the embassy to Nadir Muhammad had been
decided in a hurry and that was why so few gifts had been sent to him. He added that
the Tsar would be happy to send ‘whatever might suit? Nadir Muhammad if he
returned all the captives to Muscovy and if, following Isfandiyar's and Seit's
example, he asked for specific gifts. But his explanation did little to soothe the khan's
ruffled feelings and his offer was contemptuously ignored. The irate khan would not
be pacified and, in what Gribov took as an attempt to punish him, he gave the
ambassador neither food nor presents for the next three months. Furthermore, after

only seven days the ambassador's mehmandar was withdrawn.!7
In fact it would seem that, possibly for economic reasons, it was the practice of
Bukharan rulers not to provide a food allowance for visiting ambassadors. Such had
been the experience of ambassadors from Turkey and Iran in the past, Gribov was
told.!8 Worse still, they had not been ‘honoured’ in the khanate and they had been
kept there ‘for ten years or more’, or twice as long as their Bukharan counterparts
were kept in their countries, which was why they had stopped coming over.
But to return to Gribov's stay in the khanate. Before he had his next audience a
momentous event took place which greatly increased Nadir Muhammad's power, as
well as his prestige and self-confidence, although the khan had done little to bring it
about. This event was the annexation of Khwarazm by the khanate. In terms of

14 TSGADA, fond 134, op.1, 1641 no.2, listy 125-8.
15 According to Semenov (Bukharskii traktat", 148-9) the mihtar collected the obligatory alms
(zakat) and used unclaimed land for specific purposes. Abduraimov (Ocherki, I, 82-83) adds that
he was in charge of foreign currency in the khanate and that he also handed out the khan's
presents, taking a percentage of their value for himself from the recipients.

16 Golikova, 29.

17 TsGADA, fond 134, op.1, 1641 no.2, listy 129-31.
18 Thid., list 143. Gribov's information came from Russian captives who had been living in the
khanate ‘forty years or more’.

216

1641-51

territory this put Nadir Muhammad on a par with Muhammad Shaibani and ‘Abdallah

II, who, like him, had taken over Khwarazm, and yet there is no doubt that it was

achieved with the minimum of effort on his part.
The circumstances leading to Nadir Muhammad's acquisition of Khwarazm have
been described so differently by contemporary Khwarazmian, Bukharan, Muscovite
and Mughal sources, that it seems fitting to devote some time to analysing them.

Yushan's own account of the loss of Khwarazm to Nadir Muhammad is rather vague
and incomplete. It is given in an undated letter to his uncle Afghan Muhammad,
which was delivered to him in Muscovy in the summer of 1644 by an envoy from
Nadir Muhammad called Shaikh Baba. It makes no mention of Aba ’1-Ghazi, and it is

rather similar to the version put out by Mughal historians. According to this
Isfandiyar left instructions on his death-bed for the country, his possessions and his
sons to be given to Nadir Muhammad. Shortly afterwards, therefore, Isfandiyar's
advisers prevailed upon Yushan to go and visit Nadir Muhammad in the khanate, and
he was kept in the khanate. He was living in comfort and was short of nothing, but he
yearned to return to Khwarazm, and Nadir Muhammad had promised that he would
send him back as soon as ‘upright nobles’ from Khwarazm came over to fetch him.
In his account Yushan writes as a devoted son, full of love for his departed father, to
whom he wishes the joys of eternal life. In fact, however, this apparent model of filial
devotion had had his father blinded and killed some time before the end of June 1642,

when Gribov was first informed of Isfandiyar's fate.19
A letter from Yushan's brother Ashraf, also taken to Afghan Muhammad by
Shaikh Baba and written at the same time, confirms that Yishan was then in the
khanate. But Ashraf was still in Khwarazm, anxiously awaiting to hear from him.
Abi ’1-Ghazi's version of events does not tie up with that of Yishan and indeed
makes no mention of Yushan's reign. He says that some months after Isfandiyar's
death he was proclaimed by the Uzbeg tribes living near the Aral Sea. He then tried to
seize Isfandiyar's landholdings, but the Turkmen refused to let him have them and,

sending his nephew Ashraf to Bukhara, they read the khutbah in Nadir Muhammad's
name. Abu ’1-Ghazi accordingly attacked Khiva, ravaging the countryside outside this
town. Nadir Muhammad responded by sending governors to Khiva and Hazarasp, at
which stage Isfandiyar's widow,

together with his (other) son (Yushan?) and

daughter were taken to Qarshi.2°
The Mughal version of the takeover is rather different. Both Lahauri and
Muhammad Salih say that the Khwarazmian Princes read the khutbah in Nadir
Muhammad's name according to their father's wishes, but Muhammad Salih places
this acknowledgment of suzerainty straight after Isfandiyar's death, whereas Lahauri
places it six months later. They both agree, however, that six months after
Isfandiyar's death his sons went to ask Nadir Muhammad to appoint a Bukharan
governor, whereupon he sent over the baqawil Tahir to take over the country and to
prevent any further incursions by Abi ’1-Ghazi.?!
Gribov's account is fuller, and he can neither be accused of bias, nor of omitting

information in order to cast the blame on a particular group of people. He was told by
an official of Yashan's called Nazar Malik who may have been the former
19 Materialy, 305-6. TSGADA, fond 134, op.1, 1641 no.2, list 86-8. Gribov does not say exactly
when he found out about Isfandiyar's death, but it was some time between 12 June and 3 July.

20 Abii *1-Ghazi, tr. 339-40, text 316-7.
21 Lahauri, II, 436. Muhammad Salih, ‘Amal, II, 436.
217

Nadir Muhammad

ambassador to Muscovy, that Abu ’1-Ghazi had attacked Khiva with 2,000 men no
less than three times between December 1642 and February 1643. Whether or not
Nazar Malik had been sent to Bukhara to ask for help, and this is not made clear by
Gribov, he arrived there on 12 February. Nadir Muhammad took immediate action.22
On 2 March Gribov heard that a force of 2,000 men had gone to Khwarazm under
Uzbeg Khwajah, the amir and diplomat who had twice represented Imam Quli in
India, their orders being to seize Khiva and Hazarasp and to send Seit/Yushan to
Bukhara. When they arrived in Khwarazm, the people of Khiva were quick to open
their gates, for they disliked Yushan just as much as they feared Abu ’1-Ghazi. They
then went to the khanate and delivered Yishan, his mother and his brother Ashraf to
Nadir Muhammad ‘with their own hands’, and when Nadir Muhammad went to
Balkh (that summer), he took them all with him.?3
Nadir Muhammad was delighted with the acquisition of Khwarazm. He at once
decided to inform the Tsar of this achievement, for reasons of prestige as well as
economic considerations, and he felt it necessary to send two separate envoys with
news of his success. Although the letters which were entrusted to Kuzai Nughai and
to Shaikh Baba were written in March 1643, they were not sent off at once, for Nadir
Muhammad had resolved that at least one of his envoys must travel to Muscovy with
Gribov. First, however, the Tsar's ambassador had to be pardoned for having
delivered so very few gerfalcons, then he had to be kept in Bukhara long enough to
benefit from the new, and very generous, living allowance which was to mark his
return to favour. This ought to ensure that Nadir Muhammad's own envoys were well
treated in Muscovy.
In pursuance of this policy Gribov was accordingly given his long-awaited food
allowance on 16 April 1643. This was indeed generous, for it consisted of 5,000

batman of grain and 5,000 tanga,24 but Gribov flatly refused the grain and, either
because he hoped to leave the khanate soon, or because he wanted to be difficult in
his turn, he asked instead for an extra money allowance. Nadir Muhammad at once
agreed to his request and a total of 17,550 tanga worth 1,053 roubles,2> was
delivered to him, a sum which should have amply covered the expenses incurred by
the ambassador so far. Such prompt acquiescence should have made a good
impression on Gribov, but he still found the attitude of Nadir Muhammad and his
entourage most unsatisfactory. He repeatedly asked for an answer to the Tsar's letter
but, despite many interviews with Elentesh (Yalangtish) who was the first in the
realm after the khan and who, as such, should have been able to help him, the

required answer did not come. Worse still, Yalangtish deceived him: he kept on
promising that an answer was imminent even after the khan had left Bukhara for the
hunting season. He only became more co-operative when he realised that Gribov had
found him out. He then told the ambassador to follow the khan, who had left for
22 Gribov does not say whether Nazar Malik and his companion were sent over by Yushan or by the
people of Khiva, but Nadir Muhammad's response suggests that they were sent by the people of
Khiva.

23 TsGADA, fond 134, op. 1, 1641 no.2, listy 141-2. Haji Mir's version (208b-9b, 275b) is as
follows: Abu ’1-Ghazi defeated his brothers, they fled to Bukhara, and Nadir Muhammad sent Sufi

Sultan to take Khwarazm.
:
24 TsGADA, fond 134, op.1, 1641 no.2, list 130. According to whether the batman used on this
occasion weighed 864 gr, 4 kg 320 or 6 kg 600, this meant a consignment of 4,320 kg, 21,600
kg or even 33,000 kg. See Davidovich, "O merakh vesa"; "Materialy po metrologii", 87-90; also
Istoriya, 299-302, 315-6.

25 Not 17,500 as in Preobrazhenskii, 275.
218

1641-51

Qarshi, if he wanted a dismissal audience and the required answer.
Gribov set off at once and came upon Nadir Muhammad half-way to Qarshi. The
khan presented the ambassador as well as his son, interpreter and secretary, with a
damask caftan, a silk turban and a silk sash apiece. In addition Gribov received two
valuable knives, one with a bone handle, the other with an enamelled handle, and a

gold-chased sheath encrusted with as many as 19 turquoises. This augured well for
the success of his second audience, but in the event it was even more disappointing
than the first. Gribov began by asking about the Muscovite slaves mentioned in the
Tsar's letter, to which Nadir Muhammad answered that they would be despatched
with his next ambassador to Muscovy, and only if the Tsar had released by then ‘our
Muslims who live in your ruler's (country) near Astrakhan’. Nadir Muhammad then
asked for the Tsar to send him ‘the gerfalcon bird’ out of love, a request which
Gribov ignored, reproaching the khan instead for having gone back on his word
concerning the release of all the captives who wished to be Christians. Nadir
Muhammad ignored his reproach, whereupon Gribov reminded him of the 11

captives whom the Tsar had mentioned by name in his letter.26 The khan denied all
knowledge of this, but later promised to have another look at the Tsar's letter to see if
the men had indeed been mentioned, and the audience came to an end. Gribov then
returned to Bukhara, where he began to prepare for his return journey, and Nadir
Muhammad continued towards Qarshi.27
Shortly afterwards, in the spring or summer of 1643, a major attack was carried
out on the eastern parts of the khanate by the overall ruler of the Qalmaq, the Sungar

Batur.28 Gribov, who was still in the khanate, was told that the kuntaidzhi had come
from China with an army of no less than 40,000 Qalmaq and Qirghiz, devastating
several of the towns situated between Turkestan and Tashkent, killing many and
taking large numbers of prisoners. The total number of the dead and captured was
estimated at 30,000. An army of 20,000 under ‘Abd al-‘Aziz was sent to counter-

attack but, according
although he managed
threat, for the Qalmaq
march on Bukhara and
Muhammad refused a
‘the big tribute’ which

to Gribov's informants, the Prince suffered a major defeat,
to get back to Samarqand. The khanate was under serious
and the Qirghiz went on to announce that they intended to
Samarqand that autumn. Matters did not improve when Nadir
demand by the Qazaq Jahangir for the town of Tashkent and
he used to take ‘from the previous ruler’, for Jahangir let it be

known that he too would attack in the autumn.”?
Gribov's information was not entirely correct. It was also incomplete, for it failed
to explain the background to the Qalmaq-Qirghiz attack. According to contemporary
Oriental and Siberian sources, this seems to have resulted from the enmity which had

arisen between Batur and Jahangir. This enmity originated in Batur's attempt to take
control of traditional Qazaq encampments beyond lake Balkhash. It had been

aggravated by his capture of Jahangir some time in 1634 or 1635,3° and by
26 TsGADA, fond 134, op.1, 1641 no.2, list 82a. In fact only nine captives are mentioned there.

27 Thid., listy 132a-7a.

28 This attack took place while Nadir Muhammad was hunting in Qarshi, i.e. after 16 April, and was

over a few weeks before 31 July, when Batur was back in his capital, Kubak Saur/Kubak Sary,
somewhere between Yamysh lake and Zaysan lake. Lahauri, II, 438. Materialy po istorii russko-

mongol'skikh otnoshenii, Il, 237.

29 TsGADA fond 134, op.1, 1641 no.2, listy 142-3.
30 Materialy po istorii russko-mongol’skikh otnoshenii, I, 278, 280, 301. It is not clear from the
evidence available whether he was captured in 1634 or in 1635, but his capture is said to have

Nadir Muhammad

Jahangir's harassment of the Qalmaq encampments ever since he escaped from
captivity in 1635. A slight improvement in their relations seems to have occurred in
1640, for Jahangir sent an ambassador to Batur in September of that year, as
mentioned above, but this improvement had not lasted and in 1643 Batur decided to
crush the Qazaq altogether. Forming an alliance with the Mongol chief Ombo Erdeni

and with the Qirghiz, he marched on Turkestan with an army estimated at 50,000.31

After capturing two complete Qazaq tribes settled in the Ala-Tau, the Ala-Qirghiz and
the Tokmak, a total of some 16,000 people living between the Issyk-kul lake and the
Chu river, he plundered Turkestan and the surrounding area, leaving much
destruction in his wake. Jahangir marched against him, but first he wrote to Nadir
Muhammad whom he had helped the previous year against the Qirghiz, asking for his
assistance. As expected the khan responded at once. He instructed Yalangtush Bi to
march from Bukhara in support of the Qazaq Prince and similar orders were sent to
‘Abd al-‘Aziz in Samarqand and to ‘Abd al-Rahman Bi Ushin who had remained
near Andijan since 1642.
%
By the time they arrived Jahangir, who only had 600 men with him, had managed
to inflict a crushing defeat-on his enemy. Having positioned half his troops in a
mountain gorge with an earthen rampart in front of them, he hid with the rest of his
men. When the Qalmaq and their allies arrived, they naturally attacked the entrenched
Qazaqs who fought back fiercely. Then Jahangir attacked from the rear, using his
firearms so effectively that he killed some 10,000 men. At this stage Yalangtush
arrived on the scene and, faced with an additional 20,000 fresh troops, the allies
decided to retreat with their prisoners. While this was going on, a large Qalmaq
contingent ambushed and very nearly seized ‘Abd al=“Aziz near Tashkent. He was
only saved by the timely arrival of Yalangtiish and ‘Abd al-Rahman Bi, who put the
Qalmag to flight and pursued them, taking 1,000 prisoners.32
Nadir Muhammad was pleased to hear of his armies' success when ‘Abd alRahman reported to him in Balkh in summer 1643, but he realised that he would have
to be wary of Batur in future, and indeed the kuntaidzhi's Noghay and Qirghiz
captives told Siberian officials that their captor intended to fight Yangir and

Yalangtish in the spring of 1644.33 It was encouraging, however, to know that not
all the Qalmaq had helped Batur in his attack on Turkestan and Tashkent, and that the
Khoshout Kundelen, the Derbet Dalai Daichin, and some at least of the Torgouts
would be unlikely to help in his forthcoming campaign. Kundelen apparently
regarded Jahangir as ‘a son’ 34 and the Torgout Louzan did not want to stop using the
Bukharan slave mart. In 1643 he had been able to demonstrate his anger at Muscovite
demands that he should move his encampment further from Astrakhan by threatening
to sell the Tsar's envoy in Bukhara. And in 1644, as mentioned earlier, he had

occurred after the second major Qalmaq expedition against the Qazaqs.
31 Zjatkin, 197. Materialy po istorii russko-mongol’skikh otnoshenii, II, 237. Howorth, I, 618

gives the smaller number of 25,000 men for Batur's force.
32 Materialy po istorii russko-mongol'skikh otnoshenii,, II, 234, 237, 239. Levshin, II, 58-60.
Chuloshnikov,

Ocherki,

155. Zlatkin, Istoriya, 197-8. Muhammad

Salih, ‘Amal, II, 437-8.

Hajji Mir, 210b-1a. Lahauri, II, 438. Baddeley, II, 123-4.
33 Lahauri, II, 438. Materialy po istorii russko-mongol'skikh otnoshenii, Ul, 239.

34 Dalai Daichin was Dalai's son. Zlatkin, Istoriya, 199-200. Chuloshnikov,
Materialy po istorii russko-mongol'skikh otnoshenii, Il, 234, 239.

220

Ocherki, 156.

1641-51

exchanged gifts and embassies with Nadir Muhammad.5
In the meantime, perhaps because of his success against the Sungar Qalmaq,
Jahangir seems to have turned against Nadir Muhammad. This would account for
Gribov's report about the Qazaq leader's demands, which are not mentioned by any
other contemporary source. Jahangir might well have demanded some sort of
recognition for stopping Batur's advance, especially if he had earlier been rewarded
by Imam Quli for remaining loyal at the time of the Qazaq rebellion of the spring of
1638. But whether or not he launched the threatened attack on the khanate in late
1643, and no record of such an attack has been found, he did not take Tashkent. This
town remained in the hands of Nadir Muhammad's appointees, his son Bahram and

the ataliq Baqi Yuz.3¢
In August 1643 Gribov left Bukhara to return to Muscovy. Despite his insistence
he had failed to persuade Nadir Muhammad to free any of the Muscovite slaves held
in the khanate. The khan had not relented, even in the case of those captives who had
worked

off their bondage.

A total of 40 men,

women

and children,

whose

manumission papers were in order, came to Gribov at a village some miles from
Bukhara and begged him to take them back to Muscovy, but he was forced to leave
them behind. He tried to persuade the local official in charge to let them go and the
man agreed that they were legally free. However, he explained that he did not dare to
release them without the khan's express permission. And although Gribov was able
to ransom two women and a man, all the others were taken back to Bukhara.
On 5 August Gribov set off for Khiva with one of the envoys whom Nadir
Muhammad was sending to Muscovy to announce his conquest of Khwarazm.37
Gribov's companion, whose name was Kuzai Nughai, was far more important than
Nadir Muhammad's other envoy to Muscovy, Shaikh Baba, who was only a courier,
and who travelled separately to Astrakhan. Kuzai Nughai was a fully-fledged
ambassador. He had been chosen for this mission for two very particular reasons,

namely that he was a Noghay and that he originally came from Astrakhan. He not
only had relatives in the town, but he knew many of the local nomads whose cause
Nadir Muhammad had decided to champion with all the enthusiasm generated by his
dramatic success in Khwarazm. Nadir Muhammad had apparently been influenced in
his decision by a Noghay called Shah Niyaz Mirza who also came from Astrakhan.
Shah Niyaz Mirza had opposed the suggestion that the Russian captives be handed
over to Gribov, saying that his brethren were ‘living in Astrakhan and sitting there as
hostages’.

In the letter which Nadir Muhammad entrusted to Kuzai Nughai the khan made it
plain that he considered himself Tsar Mikhail's equal in every way. He began with a
long preamble which mirrored the opening paragraphs of a typical letter from the
Tsar, for it listed at length every one of the towns and areas over which Nadir
Muhammad held sway, among which he included Tashkent, Turkestan and

Khwarazm.38 This rather unusual start to a Bukharan letter was followed by a
reference to the long-standing diplomatic and trade ties between the two countries
which Nadir Muhammad rather condescendingly agreed to continue, after thanking
the Tsar for reminding him of their existence. The request which followed will have
35 Bogoyavlenskii, "Materialy", 80. Louzan's encampment was situated 3 days away from Astrakhan
to the north-east, and near the river Uzen’. Materialy, 200.

36 Lahauri, II, 440.
37 TsGADA fond 134, op.1, 1641 no.2, list 147-9.
38 Khwarazm was called here the land of Yurgench.

221

Nadir Muhammad

taken the Tsar entirely by surprise. He might well have thought it ridiculous and farfetched until he was told about Kuzai Nughai's and Shah Niyaz's background. Nadir
Muhammad simply asked the Tsar to have all the Noghays living in Muscovy found
and sent to the khanate, on the grounds that they were Muslims like his people, that
they got on well with his ancestors and that they had camped near them in the past.
He claimed that the Noghays were ‘slaves’ in Muscovy and made it clear that he
would only release the Muscovites held in the khanate if and when every one of the
Noghays had been freed. However, he added piously, he wished to free the
Muscovites out of consideration for the prayers of these poor people, and also for the
sake of his continuing good relations with Muscovy (ssylka). The letter came to a
close on a friendly note. Kuzai Nughai was introduced as a trusted man and Nadir
Muhammad expressed the hope that traders would ply ‘uninterruptedly’ between the
two countries in the future and that they might do so ‘safely and with less fear than

previously’ 39
Nadir Muhammad's second envoy to the Tsar, Shaikh Baba, was a
Khwarazmian. He had already been to Muscovy two years earlier on behalf of the late
Khwarazmian ruler, Isfandiyar, and no doubt he had been chosen for this mission in
order to impress the Tsar with the magnitude of the Bukharan ruler's achievement.
His testimony would add weight to Nadir Muhammad's letter to the Tsar, as would
the fact that he carried messages from Isfandiyar's sons, Ashraf and Yushan, to their
uncle Afghan Muhammad who lived in Muscovy. The letter which Nadir Muhammad
sent with Shaikh Baba was as curt as it was high-handed. It began with a brief
reference to Isfandiyar's despatch of Shaikh Baba as ambassador and royal trader,
and an explanation that he himself was now in control of Khwarazm and of
Isfandiyar's children to whom he gave an allowance. He went on to request Shaikh
Baba's dismissal and the return of the Customs dues improperly taken from this
ambassador during his previous visit. And he closed after explaining that Shaikh
Baba had been sent to help develop trade and to ensure that traders could go freely
between the two countries, without interference or delay.4°
Gribov's return journey to Muscovy was far quicker than his outward journey.
Although his stay in Khiva lasted six weeks and he had trouble with the Turkmen
who seized his goods and those of Kuzai Nughai, and then threatened to kill them, he
arrived in Astrakhan on 5 November 1643, or only three months after leaving
Bukhara. He brought back a grand total of no more than four former Muscovite
slaves, but he also brought back a long report for the Tsar on the situation in both

Bukhara

and

Khwarazm.4!

He had been entrusted with a letter for Nadir

Muhammad's ambassador Khwajah Ibrahim in which ‘Abd al-‘Aziz listed the goods
which he wanted purchasing in Muscovy. These goods included clocks, Muscovite
hides, suits of armour, walrus tusks, swords and woollen cloth in a variety of

colours, and no doubt Khwajah Ibrahim, who had arrived some time earlier in
Astrakhan,*? tried at once to purchase the varied and expensive items requested. It is

39 TsGADA, fond 134, op.1, 1641 no.2, list 146. Materialy, 178-9.
40 Khilkov, 493-4.
41 4.1, IV, 43. TSGADA, fond 134, op.1, 1641 no.2, listy 149-50. Although Preobrazhenskii
(277) says Gribov brought back a total of 40 captives ransomed by himself and others, he gives
no source for this information. Gribov himself mentions in his report that some former captives
from Khiva asked to travel back with him, but only claims to have brought back 4 captives in all,
of whom 3 at least were ransomed by him in the khanate.

42 4.1., IV, 43. He arrived some time: between his dismissal from Moscow in May 1643

222

1641-51
not known how successful he was in doing so, but it was another two years before he

was at last able to set sail for the khanate.
By this time Khwajah Ibrahim had been away from Balkh for five years and
Nadir Muhammad had become very concerned about his absence. He had even told
his grandson, Qasim Muhammad, of his concern. In a letter to the voevody of
Astrakhan written in Rabi‘I 1054/May-June 1644, Qasim Muhammad therefore
included a request for Khwajah Ibrahim's return and for the return of Amin Bahadur
who had been sent off by Isfandiyar in November 1641. Qasim Muhammad was the
son of Khusrau Sultan.43 He had been appointed by his grandfather to govern
Khwarazm in the summer of 1643. His first and unenviable task had been to put an
end to Abu ’1-Ghazi's damaging raids on the countryside around Khiva but, if we are
to believe Abi ’1-Ghazi, shortly after the Prince arrived in Khwarazm, his forces

suffered a major defeat. A detachment of 1,000 men, fully armed and covered in
armour from head to toe, were allegedly crushed by Abi ’1-Ghazi's force of 300,
which was partly unarmed and consisted only of very young and very old men.
Whether or not Qasim Muhammad was indeed defeated by Abia ’1-Ghazi, by the time
he wrote to the voevody of Astrakhan he was in full control. He was able to assure
them that Muscovite traders had nothing to fear by way of attacks from ‘the people of
the steppes or any types of nomads’ on their way to Khwarazm.“4
Indeed the main aim of this letter, which Qutush Bahadur delivered in Astrakhan
in July 1644, was to renew and strengthen the economic ties linking Khwarazm and
Muscovy. Qasim Muhammad invited Muscovite traders to resume their activities in
Khwarazm. He also asked for merchants (from the khanate and Khwarazm) to be free
to trade in all parts of Muscovy without facing undue delays, and he requested full
exemption from trade or Customs dues for his envoy's trading activities.4°
About six months later Nadir Muhammad sent another envoy to Muscovy who
arrived in Astrakhan on 11 January 1645 with a suite of three and a letter from the
khan.4® Nothing is known about Salei Bahadur's mission, but since Khwajah
Ibrahim had still not left Muscovy it can be assumed that the new envoy enquired
about his fate and requested his prompt dismissal.He may have also purchased or
sold some goods for the khan during his stay, but he is hardly likely to have got to
Moscow, for he was on his way back to the khanate a mere nine months later. When
he set sail from Astrakhan, probably in late September-early October 1645, there were

no less than five ambassadors aboard the busa.47 These ambassadors, all of whom
would be expected to report to Nadir Muhammad on their return, were Salei Bahadur,

Khwajah Ibrahim, Amin Bahadur, Shaikh Baba and Kuzai Nughai.
Kuzai Nughai and Shaikh Baba had spent the winter of 1643-4 in Astrakhan and
had only just returned there from Moscow. During their stay in Astrakhan they had
been treated in accordance with strict Muscovite rules of precedence. Kuzai Nughai,

(Materialy, 408) and the first of September of the year 151, i.e.1 September 1643.
as in Mc Chesney, Wagf, 113. See Muhammad

43 Not the son of Qutluq Muhammad

Yusuf

Munshi, 260a, and Lahauri, II, 553, for his correct parentage.

44 Aba ’1-Ghazi, tr. 338-41, text 316-9. Materialy, 185-6.

45 Tbid..
46 A.1., IV, 44.
47 yaterialy, 309. The exact date of the ambassadors’ departure is not stated here but it is known
that they took about four weeks to get to Sarytash, remained there at anchor 9 days, and were back
in Astrakhan on 16/27 November.

223

Nadir Muhammad

who travelled with a suite of ten and was an ambassador, had received a much larger
daily allowance (15 den'gi, 4 charki (0.8 pints) of wine and half a vedro (10.5 pints)
each of mead and beer) than Shaikh Baba, who was a courier and who was travelling

with only one companion. Similarly Kuzai Nughai's brother and the officials in his
suite were given a higher allowance than his servants, although this was lower than

the amount received by Shaikh Baba.*8
On 12 April 1644 the two envoys had left Astrakhan at last to go north along the
Volga. The five months spent in Astrakhan had not been wasted, for they had made
contact with the Noghays. Three of them, including Kuzai Nughai himself, had even
found time to meet and marry local Muslims.*9 The daily allowance for their journey
was provided in advance by the voevody of Astrakhan, Kazan' and Nizhnii
Novgorod. This was similar to the one given in Astrakhan, but it also included a daily
ration of oats for the horse which Shaikh Baba was taking to the Tsar. Their journey
was slow. Nearly five months was spent en route to Moscow and the particular
stretch from Kazan' to Moscow took eight weeks; or about twice as long as
anticipated. Kuzai Nughai was forced to pay the balance of his expenses from his
own pocket, but he made sure that he was reimbursed in full in Moscow. He did not
succeed, however, in obtaining a back-dated fogd allowance for the slave whom he
purchased en route.
In Moscow Kuzai Nughai and Shaikh Baba were received separately. And they
continued to be treated differently in accordance with their rank. Kuzai Nughai was
splendidly entertained. On arrival in the capital he received a welcoming gift of two
live sheep, the beef equivalent to one-third of a cow, 24 loaves of bread, 6 kruzhki
(12.6 pints) of wine and 210 pints of mead. A similar gift, except for a lesser quantity
of wine, was sent on the day of the audience, together with a goose, a duck, a
grouse, a hare and 5 cocks. Such generosity and the fact that the audience took place
only two days after his arrival, on 5 September 1644, is bound to have pleased the
ambassador, as showing the Tsar's goodwill towards his master.
As in the case of Adam Bik, horses were sent to bring Kuzai Nughai to the
audience. The Tsar sat in state for the occasion. Around him stood the greatest nobles
of the land, the Sheremetevs and the Volkonskiis, dressed in gold and black. The
Greek archbishop, Makarios, and a number of Greek elders were also present, a
pleasing indication to the ambassador that there was much general interest in him and
in his ruler. The ceremonial observed was very similar to that established during
Adam Bik's visit, although on this occasion the Tsar did not hold out his hand to be
kissed, but simply put it on the ambassador's head. During the audience Kuzai
Nughai delivered several gifts from the khan - a rich tent of calico and taffeta, silk
sashes from Kashan, and a number of lengths of damask, silk, muslin, velvet,

taffeta, some of which were threaded with gold. He also gave the Tsar a variety of
striped materials as his personal gifts, and some of these were similarly threaded with
gold.
After the audience Kuzai Nughai's allowances of money and wine were
respectively increased by 50 per cent and 25 per cent, and he was allocated a double
48 4.1. IV, 43-4, 42. Shaikh Baba was given 8 den'gi, 3 charki (0.6 pints) of wine and 3 kruzhki

(4.6 pints) each of mead and beer. It should be mentioned, however, that Kuzai Nughai's

allowance was considerably lower than that received by Adam Bik in 1620 (20 den'gi, 4 charki of
wine, one vedro (21 pints) each of beer and mead), perhaps because Adam Bik was in Astrakhan in
the summer, when the local voevoda might have had greater means at his disposal.

49 Materialy, 195.

224

1641-51

ration of firewood per week, together with a water-cart to provide for his needs. His
staff's allowance was also increased, which was most generous considering that

Nadir Muhammad had refused Gribov an allowance during the first part of his stay.50

Tsar Mikhail seems to have been determined to make a good impression on the
envoy. Perhaps this was because he wanted to persuade the khan to release the
Muscovite slaves held in the khanate and because he had already decided to send
Gribov to the khanate a second time. His answer to Nadir Muhammad's letter,
therefore, was a careful blend of complaints and rebukes, together with reminders of
his own friendly concessions to the khan and to his envoys. In this letter, which was
handed over to Kuzai Nughai on 24 May 1645, the Tsar began by stating his desire to
continue the tradition of ‘loving’ relations and trade between the two countries.
Having made clear his own good intentions he went on to complain about Nadir
Muhammad's refusal to let the Muscovite captives go, which, he said, showed an
‘unloving attitude’ on his part. Tsar Mikhail turned next to the request for the release
of the Noghays. He began with commendable moderation by pointing out that they
had been his ancestors' subjects for many generations, and had never been the

subjects of the Bukharan rulers.5! He followed this with a mild rebuke, saying, rather
unconvincingly, that since no previous Bukharan ruler had ever broached the matter it
was ‘improper’ of Nadir Muhammad to write about it. Having thus disposed of the
khan's request, the Tsar returned to the subject of the Muscovite captives and asked
for all of them to be released, whether they had worked off their bondage or not.
Nadir Muhammad was urged to do so in order to continue a tradition of good
Bukharo-Muscovite relations and in the knowledge that such an action would
guarantee him the Tsar's ‘love’.
The letter continued with an impressive demonstration of Tsar Mikhail's goodwill
for the khan. He made it clear that he had satisfied every one of the requests by Nadir
Muhammad and ‘Seit Muhammad’ (Yushan) concerning Customs dues which had
been either demanded, or taken, from Khwarazmian ambassadors in Muscovy.
Orders had been given for Amin Bahadur's goods to be exempted from dues,
regardless of the fact that the official stamp was missing from the list which the
ambassador had produced to the authorities. The monies improperly charged on
Shaikh Baba's goods would be duly returned, and so would the Customs dues paid
by Nazar Malik in 1641. Since the question of Nazar Malik had not been raised by
Nadir Muhammad, and since not even Amin Bahadur, who interceded for his
colleague in January 1643, claimed that he had been taxed on his official goods, the
Tsar was being especially generous in remitting the Customs dues in question.
Perhaps he felt bound to show particular generosity to one who had represented
Isfandiyar in Muscovy because Isfandiyar had exempted from tax the goods of every
ordinary Muscovite trader who visited Khwarazm in his day. These concessions were
followed by a declaration that Amin Bahadur, who had been in Astrakhan since
November 1643, and Shaikh Baba's son, who had apparently been kept there since

1641, would both be allowed to leave for the khanate.52
The Tsar's letter continued with an announcement that he was sending four
50 Yuldashev, K istorii torgovykh snoshenii, 92-5, 97, 37, 32.
51 The term used was kholop which literally means slave, but which was generally used by all the
Tsar's subjects when they addressed him. In fact the Noghays had been rather unreliable vassals of
the Tsars since 1556.
52 Khilkov, 493-9. Materialy, 173-6, 180. In the letter entrusted to Shaikh Baba Nadir Muhammad
had asked for the release of this ambassador's son.

225

Nadir Muhammad

gerfalcons and nearly 33 kg of walrus tusks to the khan in answer to an oral request
received from Kuzai Nughai. He added that he had lovingly received Nadir
Muhammad's pominki and that the khan's ambassadors had been well looked after in
Muscovy. Not only had they been given presents in addition to the customary food

allowance, but they had been sent back to Bukhara without (undue) delay.>> The
letter ended with an expression of hope that ‘love’, regular contact and a free
exchange of goods would be the norm between Muscovy and Bukhara in the future.
Further concessions had been made to the envoys, but Tsar Mikhail did not
mention them in his letter. Kuzai Nughai had been permitted to take back to the
khanate the women whom he and his men had married in Muscovy. Similar
permission had been given to him with regard to two Tatar slaves purchased for Nadir
Muhammad. And Shaikh Baba was allowed to buy four slaves, as requested, for the
Khwarazmian Princes Seit (Yushan) and Ashraf who were living under Nadir

Muhammad's protection.*4
There is little doubt therefore that Kuzai Nughai and Shaikh Baba had very
successfully discharged their missions, but Nadir Muhammad was to derive little
pleasure from their success, for by the time they reached Bukhara he had lost his
throne and may have already fled Balkh to seek help from the Shah. Before that
happened Nadir Muhammad had become increasingly unpopular in the khanate as a
result of his taxation measures. Not even the Jiibari shaikhs had been exempted from
them, a fact which they bitterly resented. People had begun to rally round ‘Abd al‘Aziz, and the Prince had asked to be allowed to rule Balkh, as his father had done

under Imam Quli. This request was refused outright. Nadir Muhammad had no
intention of giving up the province that he had ruled for nearly 40 years and whose
climate, in any case, he preferred to that of Bukhara.
At about the same time there was trouble in Tashkent where the ataliq Baqi Yuz
fell out with Nadir Muhammad's third son, Bahram. In an attempt to defuse the
situation the khan recalled his son and gave full responsibility over the area to Baqi
Yuz. This did not solve the problem, for Baqi Yaz went on to rebel openly against
Nadir Muhammad. One of Nadir Muhammad's most loyal and most experienced
amirs, the diwanbegi ‘Abd al-Rahman Ushin, was sent to win him over, but Baqi
Yuz withdrew into the town and prepared for a siege. Unperturbed ‘Abd al-Rahman
persevered with his task and managed to bring the amir round. Bagi Yaz was even
persuaded to go and see the khan. He accordingly set off for Bukhara with his
relatives, only to become suspicious of the khan's intentions when the governors of
all the towns on the way closed their doors to him. By the time he reached Khujand
he had made up his mind: - he would not to go to Bukhara. He remained in Khujand
and barricaded himself inside the town after taking hostage a grandson of Imam
Quli's called Sanjar Sultan. When Nadir Muhammad was told the news he instructed
‘Abd al-‘Aziz and his ataliq, Bik Ughli Kinkas, to march from Samargand with a
large army and ‘exterminate’ the rebel. Yalangtish Bi, together with other amirs from
Bukhara and Balkh and seasoned troops from both towns, were also detailed to

help.°5
53 Khilkov, 499. TSGADA, fond 109, op.1, 1669-75 kn.1, list 36a. The bundles of 40 sables
distributed to each member of the Bukharan party were worth 5 to 12 roubles, but the one received

by Kuzai Nughai was worth 50 roubles.

54 Materialy, 194-7.
55 Hajji Mir, 211b-2a. Sanjar Sultan was the son of Iskandar Sultan, killed in Tashkent in 1635.
Muhammad

Salih, ‘Amal, II, 438-40. Lahauri, II, 440-1. Qipchag Khan, 273a, gives a very

226

1641-51

The khan did not realise, however, how jealous the amirs were of ‘Abd alRahman, or how disaffected they had all become. Many had suffered from his drastic
reduction of tax-exemptions, and they all missed Imam Quli's generosity and his
laisser-faire policy. Knowing of ‘Abd al-Rahman's corrupt practices in the past, they
resented his position of trust at Nadir Muhammad's Court. Yalangtish, in particular,
could not forgive the khan for seizing his estates around Kahmard. However, he
found it difficult to break with Nadir Muhammad whom he had supported for over 30
years. That would explain why, in the weeks that followed, his attitude and his

actions were often inconsistent.>° Thus, although he seems to have made up his mind
from the start to dispose of ‘Abd al-Rahman and to place ‘Abd al-‘Aziz on the throne,
he tried nevertheless to persuade Baqi Yaz to make his peace with the khan. And if
we are to believe Hajji Mir and Lahauri his influence was crucial.
This seems to have been the order of events. Yalangtish began by securing funds
for the Prince and his supporters. At his suggestion ‘Abd al-‘Aziz summoned ‘Abd
al-Rahman over and told him to bring all the money kept in the Tashkent Treasury, as
it was needed for the campaign. When ‘Abd al-Rahman obeyed at once, Yalangtish
was apparently very disappointed for, according to Muhammad Salih, he had rather
hoped that his béte noire would procrastinate, thereby demonstrating an excessive
love of money. Yalangtish went on to tell the other amirs that because fortune no
longer smiled upon Nadir Muhammad, it was time for his son to take over. It was
incumbent upon them therefore to support ‘Abd al-‘Aziz. At this stage, however,
“Abd al-‘Aziz asked him to parley with Baqi Yuz, and Yalangtush obeyed at once. He
went to Khujand as instructed, taking with him Bik Ughli and Kafsh Qalmagq, and
when he arrived he sent a suitable message to Baqi Yuz. The rebel, who was
apparently suspicious of his motives, suggested a meeting in a narrow mountain pass
outside the town. This was agreed, but when the three amirs reached the meetingplace, Yalangtish sent Kafsh Qalmag to speak to the rebel, saying rather mysteriously
that Kafsh Qalmaq “knew Nadir Muhammad's mind and was prepared to defend
him’. The interview was short and dramatic: Baqi Yuz attacked and wounded Kafsh
Qalmagq, then he came out to fight Yalangtish and Bik Ughli, but they managed to get
away.
“Abd al-‘Aziz was furious when he heard their report. He went to Khujand and at
once undertook the siege of the town. After fifteen days, during which he had
attacked the town from all sides, a delegation of the Bukharan amirs came to see him
and persuaded, or compelled him to withdraw to the river bank nearby, saying that
they had been negotiating with the people of Khujand and would shortly bring Baqi
Yiuz over to submit. ‘Abd al-‘Aziz accordingly raised the siege, only to find that the
Bukharan army was in fact in league with Baqi Yuz. When another delegation came to
see him, they said that they would only bring Baqi Yuz over on certain conditions,
namely - the army of Balkh should be withdrawn, Nadir Muhammad must revert to
ruling Balkh, ‘Abd al-‘Aziz must rule Bukhara and the khanate, and Baqi Yuz must
be reinstated. They added that they were prepared to accept his orders and those of his
father slavishly, but they would not let Balkh control the khanate, thus making it clear

different account of the rebellion. He names its leader as Nazar (sic) Bi Bariti and says that Nazar

Bi proclaimed Sanjar Sultan as ruler of the khanate.

56 Hajji Mir, 212a, says that he rebelled at the same time as Baqi Bi Yiz (sic), but this does not
seem to have been the case in view of the hostility and suspicion with which Baqi Yuz was to
treat him.

aut

Nadir Muhammad
that they resented Nadir Muhammad's obvious preference for Balkh, which was the
town where he had lived most of his life, as well as his total reliance on its amirs.
Finally they told the Prince that if he did not accept their conditions they would
declare war upon him.
‘Abd al-‘Aziz, who had only aspired to rule Balkh, and who both knew and
trusted the Balkh amirs, began by refusing their conditions indignantly. After
deliberating with Yalangtish and ‘Abd al-Rahman, however, he had to accept a
compromise as it was clear that his life was in danger. He permitted the Balkh
contingent to leave, or rather to set up their camp a short distance away, leaving the
Bukharans in control.
The Bukharan amirs were delighted. They told ‘Abd al-‘Aziz again that Baqi Yuz
would soon submit to him. But Bagi Yiz took his time. Yalangtish, who seems to
have been entirely trusted by the Bukharan side, took charge of the negotiations and
urged the Prince to be patient. The Balkh amirs, who were led by Suyinch Bi and
Uzbeg Khwajah, took a very different view. Rather than negotiate they suggested a
combined onslaught on Khujand from the banks of the Syr-Darya which was bound
to be successful because the enemy wouid be unable to get away or obtain further
supplies, since the Balkh side also controlled the only road into the town.
At this stage the Bukharan troops took advantage of the seeming estrangement
between ‘Abd al-‘Aziz and the Balkh contingent to attack his camp. Luckily some of
the Balkh troops were warned of their intention and helped to defend him, but during
the action, the Prince was struck in the back by an arrow and was only just saved by
his coat-of-mail. He then decided to give up Khujand and he left to make a bid for

nearby Aqsu, which was also in rebel hands.>7 On his way he came upon a group of
Imam Quli's special troops (jawandn) who had seized ‘Abd al-Rahman Ushin and
were preparing to hang him, saying that he was the root cause of the whole
rebellion.58‘Abd al-‘Aziz, who was genuinely fond of ‘Abd al-Rahman, his father's
trusted servant and his own former ataliq, probably did not have enough troops with
him to intervene by force, but he halted the execution by resorting to melodrama,
demanding that they should kill him instead. He also warned that Nadir Muhammad
would seek revenge on their relatives if they killed the amir, and this made an
impression upon them. While they hesitated and deliberated among themselves, Bik
Ughli arrived with troops and freed “Abd al-Rahman.
‘Abd al-‘Aziz continued with them to Aqsu where he set siege to the town.
Shortly afterwards, he was approached, however, by the amirs of Bukhara who told
him that they could not guarantee ‘Abd al-Rahman's safety if he remained in the area,
and he was obliged to send ‘Abd al-Rahman away under escort towards Samargand
and Balkh.
As soon as Nadir Muhammad's staunchest supporter was safely out of the way
the jawanan agreed with the elders and the remaining amirs that they should depose
the khan and replace him with his son. Disregarding ‘Abd al-‘Aziz's objections to
their plan, and apparently satisfied that Yalangtish would not seek to oppose them,
they had the khutbah read in ‘Abd al-‘Aziz's name. This event, which took place on

10 Rabi‘I 1055/27 April 1645 at a caravansarai situated near Ura Tipa, was to have

57 Aqsu was situated between Khujand and Ura Tipa.

58 These troops of Imam Quli's are described as jawandn, literally ‘young men’, but they were more
probably his personal bodyguard or some sort of ‘storm troopers’.

228

1641-51

grave repercussions on the history of the khanate.59
It was watched with particular interest in India where Shah Jahan was still
planning to attack the khanate in revenge for Nadir Muhammad's attack on Kabul of
1628. He had sent no embassy to the khanate since 1640, and had not troubled to
acknowledge either Nadir Muhammad's accession, or the embassy in 1642 of
Mu’min Bik. When in Safar/April 1644 he appointed ‘Ali Mardan to Kabul, he made
it clear that he was planning the conquest of Balkh and Badakhshan, and he suggested

that the amir begin to gather troops for this purpose.® Later that year it was heard that

Tardi “Ali Qataghan, ataliq to Nadir Muhammad's fourth son, Subhan Quli, and
responsible for the area of Kahmard since late 1643, had conducted extensive raids
against the tribes which fell under the jurisdiction of Qandahar and Kabul. ‘Ali
Mardan at once retaliated and, if we are to believe Lahauri, Tardi ‘Ali did not attempt
to fight. He fled instead, on 26 Sha‘ban/23 October 1644, leaving behind his army,
his wife and his possessions. During the battle which followed 160 of his men were
killed and 19 prisoners, all of whom were related to him, were taken by the Mughals.
In late January 1645 ‘Ali Mardan delivered them to the Emperor, together with large
numbers of horses, camels and sheep, and no fewer than 1,000 standards. Shah
Jahan was delighted and, showing what Lahauri calls ‘the compassion and...kindness
which distinguished him from other rulers’ he had the prisoners incarcerated in

Gwalior fortress.©!
The Emperor made no effort to return Tardi ‘Ali's relatives to the khanate, nor

indeed does any request for their release appear to have been made. Nadir Muhammad
thought it wise not to make an issue of this, Tardi Ali having reaped the whirlwind
which he deserved. In any case, the amir had been able to return to Kahmard after the
Mughals left, and since they had made no effort to seize the area, the matter could be
allowed to rest. There was no point in antagonising the Emperor with aggressive
demands. However, as Nadir Muhammad knew that Shah Jahan had warmly
welcomed those of Imam Quli's retainers who came through India on their return
from pilgrimage earlier that year, and had even offered a post to one of them, it was
worth taking action to prevent the formation of a dangerous Irano-Mughal alliance.®2
Nadir Muhammad therefore decided to renew his diplomatic contacts with Iran, which
had lapsed since early 1642, and in late 1644-early 1645 he sent the baqawul Tahir to
Isfahan with a message of friendship and peace. The envoy, according to Muhammad
Tahir Wahid, was ‘received with favour’ by the Shah. News of his reception in
Iran ought to have given some pleasure to the khan, but by the time the baqawul Tahir
reported on his mission in October-November 1645, Nadir Muhammad was fighting
to retain his hold over the khanate and was unlikely to have been greatly cheered by
the news.
The situation in the khanate was by then a cause for grave concern. Straight after
‘Abd al-‘Aziz's proclamation Baqi Yuz had rallied to him, surrendering Sanjar Sultan
and receiving as his reward the rich province which included Khujand and Ura Tipa.
‘Abd al-‘Aziz then marched to Samargand, which he entered unopposed on 10
Rabi‘I/6 May. And Nadir Muhammad, who heard of his son's proclamation in Qarshi

59
60
61
62
63

Hajji Mir, 212b-5b. Lahauri, II, 442-7. Muhammad Salih, ‘Amal, II, 440-4. Qipchaq Khan, 273a.
Lahauri, II, 303. Khafi Khan, I, 608.
jhauri,
|
II, 401-2.
Tbid., II, 350, 379, 389.
Muhammad Tahir Wahid, ‘Abbdsnama, 62. See Lahauri, II, 454 and Muhammad Salih, ‘Amal,
Il, 449, for mention of Tahir baqawil's return to the khanate after his mission.

229

Nadir Muhammad
where he was, as usual, spending the hunting season, had fled to Balkh to gather
support.
‘Abd al-‘Aziz was in a strong position, for he controlled Bukhara and Samarqand,
and had vast resources at his command, namely 1,500,000 tanga from the Bukharan
Treasury, plus about 1,300,000 tanga which ‘Abd al-Rahman had brought himfrom
Tashkent. He had the open support of many major amirs, such as Baqi Yuz, Suyunj
Bi and Bik Ughli Kinkas who had been his ataliq ever since his own appointment to
Samargand in late 1641. Even the powerful Yalangtish Bi was on his side, although
he was reluctant to lead the Prince's armies in the impending civil war. Using his age
as an excuse, he refused to become his ataliq, and ‘Abd al-‘Aziz therefore reappointed Bik Ughli to this post.
‘Abd al-‘Aziz lost no time in showing that he was determined to exercise the
power which had been thrust upon him. He began by executing two possible rivals,
Sanjar Sultan and Sifi Sultan, although there is no evidence to suggest that either of
these Princes intended to press a claim to the throne. Sufi Sultan's fate seems
particularly tragic, for he was executed after seeking refuge with ‘Abd al-‘Aziz. The
luckless Prince was allegedly first considered as a possible candidate for the throne by
the amirs of Bukhara in 1641.64 Then in 1645 the ambitious governor of Balkh, Nadr
Bi Bariti, who had never fully accepted Nadir Muhammad as his sovereign, decided
that he would put Safi Sultan on the throne. He planned to do so en route for
Khwarazm where Sifi Sultan was to replace Qasim Muhammad as governor, but
these plans came to nothing, because Sufi Sultan, who was in Taliqan, took too long
to get to Balkh and Nadr Bi was sent on ahead alone. By the time Sufi Sultan reached
Balkh Nadir Muhammad had realised that he was a potential danger and ordered his
arrest. The Prince managed to escape to Samarqand, but unfortunately for him a
faction hostile to ‘Abd al-‘Aziz decided to adopt him as their candidate for the throne,

and when their plot was discovered he was put to death.®5
After “Abd al-‘Aziz had disposed of his rivals, he acquired a powerful and
experienced supporter in the person of Nadr Bi Baruti who returned to the khanate
and offered his services. The Prince felt confident of success, for his father had only
two supporters of similar calibre, the diwanbegi ‘Abd al-Rahman, who was
unpopular, and Tardi ‘Ali Qataghan, whose recent flight before the Mughal army
hardly recommended him as a military leader. Abd al-‘Aziz therefore decided to make
a bid for the major towns of Hisar and Chahar Jay. He knew that his younger brother
Bahram, who had been transferred to Hisar from Tashkent, had expelled his latest
ataliq, Daulat Bi, from the town and this seemed an ideal time to attack, Bahram being
new to Hisar and inexperienced in matters of warfare.
When Daulat Bi travelled to Samarqand and offered his services to ‘Abd al-‘Aziz,
the Prince wasted no time: he appointed a governor for the town and sent him there
with an army. Muhammad Bik Qipchagq, his nominee, met with fierce resistance, but
he was determined to try again. Nadir Muhammad was equally determined not to lose
Hisar in a second round. He summoned Tardi ‘Ali and Subhan Quli from Kahmard in
June 1645, sent them with another amir, Uraz Bi, to help Bahram and they forced
‘Abd al-*Aziz's nominee to give battle. This time Muhammad Bik fled, wounded, to

Samargand. Hisar had been saved. Nadir Muhammad hoped for equal success in
defending Chahar Jay against his son's army, but, although he had won the first
64 Muhammad Ma‘siim, 289. See more about him above.

65 Lahauri, II, 449, 447-8. Muhammad Salih, ‘Amal, I, 444-5. Hajji Mir, 216a-b.
230

1641-51

round against “Abd al-‘Aziz, he would lose the second, chiefly due to Mughal
interference.
Ever since ‘Ali Mardan's success against Tardi ‘Ali in October 1644 Shah Jahan
had been preparing for the invasion of Balkh and Badakhshan. A number of troops
and amirs had been sent to Kabul with instructions to march on Badakhshan as soon
as circumstances seemed favourable, and with ‘Ali Mardan as their Commander-in-

Chief. Then on the 29 Rabi‘II 1055/24 June 1645,6° the governor of Ghurband,
Khalil Bik, arrived in’Kabul with news that Tardi ‘Ali and Subhan Quli had left

Kahmard for Hisar. This was just the sort of opportunity that the Mughals had been
waiting for. “Ali Mardan at once sent Khalil Bik to the area with 3,000 men, and they
easily took Kahmard as it had been left virtually undefended. This was a serious blow
to Nadir Muhammad, as the town was of major strategic importance and its loss left
the eastern approaches to the khanate totally unprotected. Tardi ‘Ali at once received
orders to leave Hisar and return to Kahmard, and ‘Abd al-Rahman Ushin, who had

been on his way to relieve Chahar Jay, was sent to join him. Although this resulted in
the loss of Hisar and Chahar Jay to ‘Abd al-‘Aziz shortly afterwards, Nadir
Muhammad's control of Kahmard was quickly restored. Tardi ‘Ali and ‘Abd alRahman cut down a Mughal force sent to supply the garrison and then retook the fort.
They did so with little difficulty, for the garrison was only 60-men strong and Khalil
Bik had left for Duhak without taking the precaution of strengthening the defences.
Delighted with their success, Tardi ‘Ali returned to give Nadir Muhammad the good
news, but his delight would turn out to have been as ill-advised, as it was premature.
“Abd al-Rahmaan, who had stayed behind, was soon told that the whole of the
Mughal army was on its way to Kahmard. He sent men to seize the river valleys and
bridges, and retired to Ghuri in some trepidation to await further developments.’
And there was certainly a lot of activity on the Mughal side. When ‘Ali Mardan was
told that Khalil Bik had failed to make adequate provision for the defence of
Kahmard, he at once sent 6,000 men under Asalat Khan to reinforce the garrison, but

they did not get there in time. ‘Ali Mardan therefore prepared to march and retake
Kahmard himself, but luckily for “Abd al-Rahmaan, he was forced to reconsider his
decision in the light of the information received about the terrain itself and the

possibilities of supplying his army en route. The route, he was told, lay along narrow
gulleys taking no more than two men at a time, provisions were scarce, forts would
have to be built for safety on the way, and in any case they could not afford to send
off two

armies,

one

toward

Kahmard

and another towards

the Panjshir and

Badakhshan. The conquest of Badakhshan was clearly most important, so he set off
towards the Panjshir, but here too there were problems. There were high mountains
to cross which would exhaust his horses, the river valleys and bridges were in enemy
hands, and the snowy season was at hand. Realising that it was not practical to
continue with the campaign at the time, ‘Ali Mardan called a halt and sent off various
parties on reconnaissance while he took up winter quarters in the area. ‘Abd alRahman was well-pleased with the result of his efforts, but this was to be his last
success, for shortly afterwards he was poisoned by order of the governor of Ghuri,

who, like many others in the khanate, had become jealous of him.°8
66 |
ahauri, II, 449-50, 457. Muhammad Salih, ‘Amal, II, 451 and Khafi Khan, I, 611-2, appear to
place this respectively in late May and in late July.

67 Mughal historians say that he fled there, but it seems more likely that he went to Ghuri in order
to supervise and co-ordinate the defence of the valleys.
68 For this section Khafi Khan's account is preferred, as being fairer to the “Uzbegs” than that the

231

Nadir Muhammad

Meanwhile law and order were breaking down in the province of Balkh due to the
activities of the Alman. Gangs of these lightly-armed raiders, who in the past had
profitably raided Khurasan and the province of Kabul in the past, were now
apparently turning their attention to the khanate itself. In August 1645 they plundered
the area of Andkhud which was then governed by Nadir Muhammad's grandson,
Qasim Muhammad. This Prince had presumably been appointed there after returning
from Khiva where he had been replaced as governor by Nadr Bi Baruti, as mentioned
above, and later by a certain Ya‘qub Tupit, who was to lose Khwarazm to Abu ’1Ghazi.®9 In late September the Alman attacked again, this time nearer Balkh, at
Aqcha. Nadir Muhammad sent Tardi ‘Ali to deal with them and they fled before him
with their booty, only to be intercepted at Kelif by a detachment from Balkh who
forced them to fight. Whatever the outcome of this battle, shortly afterwards the
Alman conducted another destructive raid, this time on the small town of Jauzjan,

only one day away from Balkh 7° and here, if one is to believe Mughal reports, they
put to death a learned Sifi and his young students.7!
Shortly afterwards Nadir Muhammad attempted to retake Hisar, which he had lost
in July during the reconquest of Kahmard by Tardi ‘Ali and ‘Abd al-Rahman. First
Tardi ‘Ali and Subhan Quli were sent to besiege nearby Baisun, then reinforcements
were despatched under Bahram Sultan and Uraz Bi. ‘Abd al-‘Aziz also sent large
numbers of men to the area under Nadr Bi Baruti, and soon two major armies, which
included all the main amirs of the land, were facing each other outside Hisar. A battle
took place but it was inconclusive as neither side was enthusiastic enough about the
issues involved to give their best. The amirs on both sides decided that only a
charismatic leader could fire the men's enthusiasm for the main battle of the civil war.
They appealed to ‘Abd al-Aziz and Nadir Muhammad, asking them to lead their
respective troops to victory, but whereas ‘Abd al-*Aziz responded to his amirs' plea,
Nadir Muhammad refused to leave Balkh in case the town was taken in his absence.

The amirs of Balkh lost heart on hearing his answer and, feeling that their side was
now at a distinct disadvantage their commander, Uraz Bi, decided not to risk a
decisive battle. He left the battlefield and took the army back to Balkh, thinking Nadir
Muhammad would be pleased that his army was intact. In fact Nadir Muhammad was
furious for, by his refusal to fight, Uraz Bi had sealed the fate of Hisar. Furthermore,
in his haste to leave the area, the amir had omitted to guard the route to Balkh. ‘Abd
al-‘Aziz was thus able to follow him without hindrance as far as Tirmidh. This town
being dangerously near Balkh, Nadir Muhammad was forced to negotiate a peace
settlement by which he declared himself satisfied with Balkh and Badakhshan, and
left the remainder of the khanate to his son. But as soon as ‘Abd al-‘Aziz retired he

obviously biased account of other Mughal historians. Khafi Khan, I, 611-3. Lahauri, II, 450, 457-

62, 451. Muhammad Salih, ‘Amal, II, 451-3. Hajji Mir, 221a.
69 Aba *1-Ghazi, tr. 343, text 320. In his memoirs Abi ’1-Ghazi claims to have entered Khiva at the

beginning of the Year of the Fowl, i.e., in spring (1645), ‘after Nadir Muhammad lost his
throne’, by which he probably meant some time after April 1645. But in a letter to the Tsar
written about September 1646 he claimed to have been in control of Khwarazm for (no more than)
a year. Materialy, 199, 317.

70 According to Lahauri it was situated to the west of Balkh.
71 Lahauri, II, 452-3, says that there were as many as 10,000 Alman at Aqcha, but Muhammad Salih
(‘Amal, II, 447-8) gives a lower figure of.2,000.

232

1641-51

took vengeance on Uraz Bi and his family.72
Meanwhile the Mughals were continuing their preparations to invade. In August
“Ali Mardan sent a detachment of troops under Asalat Khan to survey part of the route

to Badakhshan.’3 Eight days later this task force returned. It had covered a lot of

ground, surveying the area by a circular march which started not far from Charikar
and went north to Khenjan, turning eastwards past Andarab and Sarab before

returning along the Panjshir valley.’4 In addition to much vital information, Asalat

Khan brought back a number of Hazaras to swell the Mughal army, as well as large
numbers of cows, sheep, horses and camels, to provide food and transport for the
army. A report was then despatched to Shah Jahan and he instructed his amirs to
begin the campaign as soon as possible. In the meantime he assigned precise locations
for the winter quarters of each of the amirs, and he gave orders for a suitable road to

be cut into the mountains in preparation for the forthcoming invasion.75
In late October 1645, at about the time when Nadir Muhammad's troops failed to

retake Hisar, the Mughal position in the approaches to Badakhshan was strengthened
by the initiative of the Rajah Jagat Singh. He marched rapidly to Khust,” Sarab and
Andarab, and his armed presence in the area caused the local tribes to volunteer their
help. They also expressed willingness to submit to the Emperor, provided that a
fortress was built in the area and garrisoned by Mughal troops, and the Rajah
accordingly built a wooden fort at Chubin for their defence. This was a serious
development. Nadir Muhammad at once sent over an army under Kafsh Qalmag to try
and destroy the fort, but, although he attacked repeatedly in October and November
1645, the amir failed either to dislodge the Rajah or to demolish the fort 77
In Balkh, meanwhile, the situation was rapidly deteriorating. Tardi ‘Ali, whom
Nadir Muhammad had appointed as diwanbegi in place of ‘Abd al-Rahmaan, seems to
have used his new position rather unscrupulously. He appointed inexperienced men
(presumably his own friends and supporters) to positions of authority and eliminated
others by accusing them of being supporters of Uraz Bi. This only made Nadir
Muhammad more unpopular in the eyes of his people, while the administration fell
into chaos and the armed forces disintegrated. At this stage, in about November 1645,
Nadir Muhammad wrote to Shah Jahan.
The letter which Nadir Bik Shawait delivered in Lahore in late January 1646 has
unfortunately not survived,’® but it is generally assumed that it contained a request
for military help. That he should have taken such a foolish step, in view of Shah
Jahan's known ambition to conquer at least part of the khanate, is usually explained
by saying that the 55-year-old khan's recent difficulties, stemming from his son's

coronation, had unhinged him.7? There is little doubt that he ought to have been wary
72 Lahauri, II, 454-6, 549. Muhammad Salih, ‘Amal, II, 449-51. Hajji Mir, 221a. Uraz Bi was
killed, but his sons rebelled and consequently appear to have been outlawed. However, they came
back a year later and fought the Mughals with Nadir Muhammad in July 1646.

73 His troops were variously estimated as 1,000 (Muhammad Salih, ‘Amal, II, 453), 2,000 (Khafi
Khan, I, 613) and 10,000 strong (Lahauri, II, 462).

74 Sarab is situated on the Andarab river about 30 miles east of Banow/Andarab.
75 Lahauri, II, 462-3. Muhammad Salih, ‘Amal, Il, 453-4. Khafi Khan, I, 614.

76 Not found.

77 Lahauri, II, 463-70. Muhammad Salih, ‘Amal, II, 453-7. Khafi Khan, I, 614-6.
78 Lahauri, II, 479. Muhammad Salih, ‘Amal II, 460. Khafi Khan, I, 618, dates Nadir Shawait's
arrival at the Mughal Court a month earlier.

79 Wajji Mir, 222a. Muhammad Yisuf Munshi, 260b-2b, embroiders on this theme, saying that
Nadir Muhammad's decision was taken after his sons Qutlug and Subban Quli, and his grandson

233

Nadir Muhammad

of Shah Jahan, especially if he knew that the Emperor had sent a large sum of money
to Imam Quli in Mecca, allegedly in order to make up for Nadir Muhammad's
meanness to the former monarch.8° However, there is no evidence that Nadir
Muhammad was in a distracted state of mind at the time and it seems more likely that
he hoped to forestall or delay the intended invasion by making friendly overtures to
the Emperor. In fact, although Nadir Bik Shawait was received several times by the
Emperor and treated generously, his presence at Court did nothing to slow down
Shah Jahan's extensive preparations for the campaign. The arrival of refugees from
the khanate on 11 November 1645 had given the Emperor a pretty good idea of Nadir
Muhammad's vulnerability and of the state of confusion reigning there. The time
seemed ideal for an attack, and news that a learned Sufi had been killed by the
‘godless’ Alman gave Shah Jahan just the pretext he needed - he could say that he
was intervening in order to restore order and to defend the representatives of the
Muslim faith.
On the last day of Dhii ’I-hijja/16 February 1646 Shah Jahan despatched Murad
Bakhsh, together with ‘Ali Mardan and various amirs, to the province of Kabul. On 5
April he sent belated messages of condolences on the death of Shah Safi to Iran,
hoping this gesture would persuade ‘Abbas II not to support Nadir Muhammad. The
following day, satisfied that he had taken all the necessary steps to ensure his success
on the military and the diplomatic front, the Emperor set off for Kabul, for he wanted
to keep in close contact with his army. It is not known whether Nadir Bik Shawait
was then dismissed, but this seems unlikely, because he would have warned Nadir
Muhamad about the planned attack and the Emperor wanted his army to take the
khanate by surprise.®!
As soon as Prince Murad and ‘Ali Mardan arrived in Kabul on 25 May the large
Mughal army of some 60,000 men began its march. The two commanders joined it
twelve days later at Charikar, where it was found necessary to clear the roads of
nearly two metres of snow. After this had been done the army split into two. The
Prince and ‘Ali Mardan marched northwards to Andarab and Qunduz, while Khalil

Bik took a route beset with difficulties, going west through the notorious Shibar Pass
to Bamian and then north-west and north-east along narrow mountain tracks to take,

first Kahmard and then Ghuri.82 He met with little resistance at Kahmard, for the
garrison was a small one and Tardi ‘Ali Qataghan allegedly abandoned the town on
hearing of Khalil Bik's approach, taking with him the greater part of the troops and
announcing that he was going to strengthen the mountain passes of the area. In
contrast the Uzbeg governor of Ghuri is said to have fought so bravely that when the
town fell around 8 July the Mughal commanders spared his life and that of his son in

Qasim Muhammad had defected to ‘Abd al-‘Aziz. But this was not so. All three young men were
on his side at the time. Vambéry, History, 320, repeats this verbatim. Varma, "Mughal
Imperialism", 257, writes that Nadir Muhammad was afraid for his own safety and sent off his

ambassador during his confrontation with his son at Hisar, but no evidence is given to
substantiate this claim.

80 Lahauri, II, 390. Muhammad Salih, ‘Amal, Il, 413. Khafi Khan, I, 604. The money, 100,000

Tupees, was despatched in November 1644, several months too late to be of any use to Imam Quli
who had died on 9 Dhii ’! hijja/18 February. Hajji Mir, 203b.

81 Lahauri, II, 471, 481, 483, 486, 491, 492, 493, 500, 595. Muhammad Salih, ‘Amal, II, 460-1,
463-7, 469. Khafi Khan, 619, says Murad Bakhsh was sent off at the beginning of Dha ’1-hijja,
;
i.e. a month earlier.
82 See Harlan, 96, for a nineteenth century description of the difficulties of the "Sibber".

234

1641-51

recognition of his courage.
Luck was definitely on the Mughal side, for in mid-June, about a week before the
fall of Kahmard, Nadir Muhammad's son Khusrau decided to abandon Qunduz to its
fate and to seek the Emperor's protection. He accordingly wrote to Shah Jahan and,

as soon as he received a favourable answer, he left his post. According to Lahauri and
other Mughal historians, the immediate reason for the Prince's defection was his fear
of the Alman force known to be on its way against Qunduz. It seems more likely,
however, that the Prince was reluctant to risk his life fighting the mighty Mughal
army in order to retain Qunduz for a father whom he had always regarded with little
affection. On 23 June, two days before the fall of Kahmard, Khusrau arrived at Sarab
where he met Prince Murad. The Mughal Prince received him with great warmth,
gave him rich presents and made him sit by his side on the very same dais. Then he
sent Khusrau off under escort to see Shah Jahan in Kabul. Ten days later Prince
Murad and his army entered Qunduz where, if we are to credit Lahauri, they were
hailed as deliverers. The people of Qunduz are said to have rejoiced because they had
been saved both from ‘the tyranny’ of the Uzbegs, and from the depredations of the
Alman who had taken their town, looting and killing indiscriminately since Khusrau's
departure. But this does not appear to have been the case and the Mughals did not feel
entirely welcome. According to Muhammad Salih, the Prince took the precaution of
camping outside the town at first. And before entering Qunduz he had money
distributed, on his father's orders, to the widows, orphans and dispossessed in order
to ‘conciliate’ them and buy their allegiance. This was a wise move, for the capture of
Qunduz was crucial, as it was the key to Badakhshan, a province which the khanate
had held and defended against India since 1584 and the Mughals hoped that it would
revert to them without further ado, straight after the fall of Qunduz.
On 5 July Murad Bakhsh left Qunduz for Khulm and Balkh.®3 That same day he
received two letters from his father. In the first Shah Jahan explained that he had
several scores to settle with Nadir Muhammad, due to his attack on Kabul in 1628
and his subsequent refusal to allow Waqas Hajji's wife to follow her husband to
India. Nevertheless, if Nadir Muhammad repented and succeeded in regaining control
of the province of Balkh, Murad Bakhsh was instructed to ‘give Balkh back to him’!
Badakhshan, on the other hand, was to be retained by the Prince until such a time as
the ‘servants of hypocrisy’ (the Alm4n) were totally crushed. And if Nadir Muhammad should decide to try and recover Samargqand and Bukhara from his son, then
Murad Bakhsh ought to help him with money and troops.
The second letter was addressed to Nadir Muhammad. It had been hastily drafted
in Kabul and was aimed at dispelling any fears that the khan might entertain
concerning the Mughal army. The Emperor declared that he had decided to intervene
on hearing from Nadir Bi (Shawait) that the situation in the khanate was desperate and
that Nadir Muhammad had lost all his possessions except for Balkh. He had therefore

despatched Prince Murad and his army with instructions to ‘inflict a well deserved.
punishment’ on the wicked ‘sectarians of depravity’ (the Alman).
This letter was sent to the khan from Khulm on 25 Jumada I/9 July with Ishaq
Bik, and his reaction to it shows clearly that Nadir Muhammad was in full control of
his faculties. He pretended to be delighted with the message it contained and thanked
Heaven for relieving him at last from the fear of sedition. He declared himself
83 Lahauri, Il, 503, 506-27. Muhammad Salih, ‘Amal, 471, 473-81. Khafi Khan, I, 624-6. Hajji
Mir, 225a-7b, 232b-3a.

235

Nadir Muhammad

confident that order would soon be restored and said that after meeting the Prince he
would go to Kabul to thank the Emperor for his kindness, and then make his way to
the Holy Places. Nadir Muhammad went even further in a letter to Prince Murad
despatched before Ishaq Beg's arrival and delivered on 11 July by Chichik Bi. He
declared that his kingdom and all his possessions belonged to the ‘threshold of the
Caliphate’ (the Emperor) and he asked for a few days's grace in which to collect
together a few belongings before leaving for the Hijaz.
This had no effect whatsoever upon Prince Murad. The Prince, who was by then
about 26 miles from Balkh, dismissed Nadir Muhammad's request as a mere ploy
aimed at gaining time. Urged to take immediate action by Ishaq Bik, who had
returned on 10 July and who was convinced that Nadir Muhammad was totally unable
to resist the Mughal forces, Prince Murad continued on his way. When he was about
four miles from Balkh a second embassy from Nadir Muhammad reached his camp.
This delegation had little more success than that of Chuachik Bi, although it slightly
delayed the Prince's advance, for he had to receive it in style. It was led by two of the
khan's sons, Subhan Quli and Bahram, and also included a number of influential
khwajahs. The Prince kept them all waiting, allegedly because he needed time to
arrange a suitable reception, but also because he.wanted to punish them for coming
upon him unannounced, and also to make enquiries about them. When they were at
last admitted to his presence, he was sitting on a gold-embroidered couch in his tent
and he placed them on his right in strict order of precedence. He treated them with
great generosity, ‘observing the rules of hospitality’, no doubt with a lavish meal. He
presented each of the khan's sons with a rich outfit, a bejewelled dagger and a horse
with a gold saddle, and distributed rich robes to their companions. Then he asked
them to tell Nadir Muhammad that he had come to ‘punish those who defied the law’
and sent them all back. The following day, although his troops were exhausted after a
seven weeks’ march through mountainous terrain, Prince Murad struck camp and set

off for Balkh.84
When the Mughal army arrived in Balkh on 28 Jumada 1/12 July 1646 it must
have made a great impression on the local people because of the wealth of gold,
jewels, silk and brocade which decorated the men's uniforms, their weapons and
even the accoutrements of their horses and elephants. Murad Bakhsh at once sent
soldiers to seize the gates of the citadel, then he despatched Ishaq Bik to Nadir
Muhammad with a letter. Although this letter was aimed at pleasing the khan and at
gaining his confidence and friendship, it only succeeded in causing offence and alarm
by showing clearly that the Mughals had come as conquerors, and not as friends. The
Prince began well enough by saying that he was looking forward to meeting Nadir
Muhammad, but he did not offer to visit the older man first, as he ought to have done.

Instead he merely said that he would go (out of his tent) and greet the khan warmly
when he came out of the citadel. He only made matters worse when he added that he
would accompany Nadir Muhammad to the house which had been allocated to him,
and he compounded his faux pas by announcing that the khan would be invited to
dinner with all ceremony, not that very day, but the following day. His letter implied
that the khan would

be virtually under house arrest from then on, but Nadir

Muhammad assured Ishaq Bik that he was pleased with the postcript to the letter, in
which Murad Bakhsh promised to pay him a visit if the khan would visit him first
84 T ahauri, II, 527-36. Muhammad Salih, ‘Amal, II, 481-3. Khafi Khan, 626-30. Hajji Mir, 233ai
4b.

236

1641-51

‘without ceremony’. Nadir Muhammad then made his way to one of his numerous
estates (the chahar bagh Murad) outside Balkh, purportedly to supervise preparations
for the banquet which he would be giving in the Prince's honour. But when he got
there he gathered together jewels and money, and fled, accompanied by his sons
Subhan Quli and Qutluq Muhammad, and a few trusted servants.85
When Murad Bakhsh found out that Nadir Muhammad had escaped, he was
furious. He at once despatched two regiments under Asalat Khan in hot pursuit, but
theirs was no easy task: They had no idea of the direction which he might have taken,
and the extreme heat made it impossible for them to march except in the latter part of
the day. Three days later they were informed that the khan had joined Tardi ‘Ali
Qataghan and a number of fighting men from the Alchin, Diarman, Qataghan and
other tribes near Shiburghan. They hastened in that direction and a fierce battle took
place some miles outside this town, in the course of which Nadir Muhammad's army
was cleft in two and ultimately defeated. To the khan's chagrin his amirs would not
let him take part in the battle himself, and when his army scattered he was obliged to
leave the battlefield. He made for Shiburghan and thence to Andkhud with Qutlug
Muhammad, but Subhan Quli broke away from them, going north to Chahar Jay and
Bukhara on the advice of Tardi ‘Ali. In Andkhud Nadir Muhammad was welcomed
by his grandson Qasim Muhammad who set off with him and Qutluq Muhammad
towards Marw and Iran where they intended to ask ‘Abbas II for help. They were
accompanied by some 300 retainers.
Luckily for them Asalat Khan showed little interest in following up his advantage:
satisfied that the khan's army had been put out of action, he did not pursue Nadir
Muhammad, but set about pacifying the surrounding area. This allowed Nadir

Muhammad to get away.86 From Marw the khan and his party travelled via Mashhad,
Bistam, and Kashan

to Isfahan. They arrived there in October with an Iranian

mehmandar who met them in Bistam, and a military escort which, according to
Tavernier's informants, was sent to Kashan, four days out of the capital, in order to

honour the khan.87 Horses bedecked with jewels lent additional dignity to his cortége
all the way to the capital. Tavernier explains that ‘tous les jours (Nadir Muhammad)
estoit servi par differens Officiers, on lui dressoit une nouvelle tente ot on étendoit de
nouveaux tapis, & on changeoit les douze chevaux que l'on menoit en main devant
luy, & dont les harnois estoient tous couverts de pierreries’. And the Shah himself

came a full farsakh (3-4 miles) out of town in order to welcome the royal fugitive into
Isfahan.
During his stay Nadir Muhammad was repeatedly invited to Court. The Shah's

85 Lahauri, Il, 537-9. Muhammad Salih, ‘Amal, II, 483-5. Hajji Mir, 234b-5a. A chahar bagh was
a country estate consisting generally of a pavilion or house set in a beautiful garden or park which
included also an orchard.

ahauri, II, 539-40, 548-53. Muhammad Salih, ‘Amal, II, 484-7. Khafi Khan, I, 630-1, 634-6.
86 |
Hajji Mir, 235b-7a. Asalat Khan was later disciplined for his failure to pursue the khan.
87 Various dates are offered for his arrival to the Iranian capital. Muhammad Yusuf Walih, 185a, says

he arrived there in Mehr 1026/after 23 September. In English factories, 1646-50, pp. 51-52, his
arrival is placed around 20 September (1 October). Muhammad Tahir Wahid, ‘Abbasnama, 75-717,
says he reached the Iranian capital just before 17 Ramadan/27 October. Tavernier, Les six
voyages, I, 580, appears to confuse Nadir Muhammad and Imam Quli. He writes that the “Prince
des Usbeks’ who came to Iran to ask for help against a rebellious son, had been wounded in the

eye in 1642 and had been consequently ‘incapable d'agir durant quelque temps’. And he places his
arrival in 1643.

237

Nadir Muhammad

own physician was sent to treat him when he fell ill, but his request for armed help
against his son was received with little enthusiasm by the Shah's advisers. Although
the Shah himself responded favourably, it was soon clear that his new Grand Vizier

was very reluctant to get involved.88 Indeed Khalifa Sultan insisted that Nadir
Muhammad was unpopular and that nothing would be achieved by sending help.
Bitterly disappointed, Nadir Muhammad decided to leave Isfahan for Khurasan as
soon as he was fit enough to travel.
By the time he left Isfahan, probably in November, the Shah had relented and

provided him with a large number of troops,8? but Nadir Muhammad had become
suspicious of their intentions. He therefore chose to travel separately as far as
Mashhad, alleging, however, that he only chose the longer route through Mazandaran
because as a convalescent he would benefit from the milder weather of this province.
The troops accordingly went to Mashhad by the direct route and when he joined them
there he found that his suspicions were justified, for they had been instructed not to
leave Khurasan. They had only been sent with him as an escort and were not intended
to fight on his behalf. The fourteen-year-old Shah had taken the advice of his
experienced grand vizier, after all, and, perhaps out of fear of Mughal reprisals, they
had decided to do no more for him.
From Mashhad Nadir Muhammad went on to Marw where he was received with
little enthusiasm, for the governor feared that his arrival would cause the 60,000

Turkmen camping nearby to move their encampments to Balkh.2° Nadir Muhammad
realised bitterly that he would have to try and regain his throne without help from
Iran.

After spending a few days outside Marw in March 1647,?! he was preparing to
march to Bukhara when he had a visit from his former amir Kafsh Qalmaq. The amir
warned him that his life would be in danger if he entered Bukhara. He suggested
instead that Nadir Muhammad try and regain Maimana from the Mughals and this was
agreed. They then set off together towards the province of Balkh, but either out of
caution, or because he was still feeling the effects of his recent illness, the khan did
not take control of the siege. He delegated this task to Kafsh Qalmaq and Qasim
Muhammad and while they were besieging the town with the help of the amir's
Qalmaq supporters, he went to Jijektu to await their news.92
While he was in Iran the Mughals had consolidated their hold over the province of
Balkh. They had begun by taking his personal possessions and were disappointed to
find that five-sixths of his immense

fortune had vanished through distribution,

88 Lahauri, II, 658-61. Muhammad Salih, ‘Amal, II, 528-31. Khafi Khan, I, 651-4. Hajji Mir, 247a9a. Muhammad Tahir Wahid, ‘Abbdsndma, 73-81. See Burton, "Nadir Muhammad", for stories of
his alleged rudeness to the Shah during his stay.

89 TsGADA, fond 109, op.1, 1646 no.1, list 76. Gribov said 70,000 men were sent with him.
Tavernier, Les six voyages, I, 580-1, gives a figure of 23,000 men for the troops sent to help
him regain his throne. He also appears to believe that a large sum of money was given to ‘le
Prince des Usbeks’, and that in return for this the khan gave the Shah one of his richest provinces.
90 They even tried to keep him in Iran under guard, or so Gribov was told. TSGADA, fond 77, op.2,
1646 no.2, listy 84-85.
91 A message which Nadir Muhammad sent from there to Isfahan was passed on to Gribov in
Farhabad by 6 April. TSGADA fond 109, op.1, 1646 no.1, list 112.
92 | ahauri, II, 662-4. Muhammad Salih, ‘Amal, II, 531-2. Khafi Khan, I, 654-6. Hajji Mir, 249a50a. Muhammad Tahir Wahid, ‘Abbdsndma, 81-83. TsGADA, fond 109, op.1, 1646 no.1, listy

84-85; fond 77, op.2, 1646 no.2, list 33 b. Gribov was told in Iran that the khan had large
numbers of Iranian troops with him at Maryzhan (Marw Shahijan) and at Mashhad.

238

1641-51

confiscation by “Abd al-‘Aziz, or robbery. The silver, gold and bejewelled objects left
were only worth about 12 million rupees.%3 But there was also an unspecified number
of mares, plus 2,500 horses and 300 camels, in his stables and all this was sent to the
Emperor in Kabul, to be followed later by those members of Nadir Muhammad's
household whom he had left behind when he fled Balkh.94
The Mughals then seized the various towns of the province with no apparent
resistance. Andkhud, Maimana, Jijektu and Shiburghan opened their doors, while in
Balkh the major officials and leaders of the religious class hastened to express their
goodwill to the conquerors. Taib Khwajah Jiibari, Khwajah Parsa and ‘Abd al‘Aziz's spiritual director, ‘Abd al-Ghaffar, are said to have actually conducted prayers
in the Emperor's name within three to five days of Nadir Muhammad's flight. As for
the former ambassador to India, Mansi Hajji, he not only gave up Tirmidh to Asalat
Khan, he even hurried to Balkh to offer his services to Murad Bakhsh, and was
rewarded for his zeal with an appointment as civil judge.95
All this was relayed to Shah Jahan in Kabul, who

was

delighted with the

remarkable ease of the conquest. Wasting no time in confirming the annexation, he
had coins issued on 3 Jumada II/17 July and declared an eight-day public holiday of
festivities and rejoicing. However, all was not well in the Mughal camp. Less than
two weeks later a letter from Murad Bakhsh shook the Emperor out of his state of
euphoria. The Prince had apparently tired of the campaign and had taken a great
dislike to the climate, the water, the food, and also the people of the area.
Furthermore, he was disappointed that he had received no reward for his
achievement. He therefore asked to return to India on the grounds that he had
accomplished his mission, and that the air and the water of the area were ruining his
health. Shah Jahan was indignant when he read this letter. But in order to dissuade
his son from his proposed course of action he wrote to him in his own hand, a rare
honour which ought to have carried particular weight with the young man.
Murad Bakhsh was told that he now had an infinite claim on his father's
goodwill, and that his request was both foolish and ill-considered, for the task was by
no means complete. Much was yet to be done, Balkh being only the key to Ma wara’
al-nahr. Each and every pass and fortress must be taken, the Prince must prepare for
further battle when Nadir Muhammad's supporters regrouped their forces, and he
must impose the rule of law and order over all the tribes of the area. Finally, in an
attempt to appeal to his son's pride and ambition, Shah Jahan hinted that if Murad
Bakhsh were to leave he would fall out of favour and whoever replaced him would
then reap the full glory of the campaign. But the Prince would not be persuaded.
Leaving Asalat Khan, Bahadur Khan and Khalil Allah in charge, he returned to

India.96
As soon as Shah Jahan heard about this, he appointed his most capable minister,

93 About 60 million tanga. Tales of Nadir Muhammad's fabulous fortune may well have been pure
fabrication. Gribov, who was in Bukhara in 1643, was not impressed. On the contrary, he reported
at the time that the Treasury was very poor and that there were no precious stones, pearls or rich
robes. The khan even had to borrow in order to pay wages and provide for his daily needs.

TsGADA, fond 134, op.1, 1641 no.2, list 144.

94 | ahauri, I, 540-1. Muhammad Salih, ‘Amal, II, 487-8. Khafi Khan, I, 631-2. Hajji Mir, 235b.
95 Lahauri, II, 544, 555. Muhammad Salih, ‘Amal, II, 490, 493. Khafi Khan, I, 634. Hajji Mir,
240b, appears to indicate that most of the religious dignitaries were sent to India at this stage.
96 Hajji Mir, 237a-8b. Lahauri, II, 546, 556-9. Muhammad Salih, ‘Amal, II, 490-1, 493-5. Khafi
Khan, 636-7.

239

Nadir Muhammad
Sa‘dallah Khan, to replace the Prince. Sa‘dallah was sent off on 26 Jumada II/6

August 1646, with lengthy and detailed instructions. He was ordered to appoint
governors to the various towns, to find out the exact income which would accrue

from the area, and to organise the transfer of Nadir Muhammad's relatives to Kabul.
He was also to effect a reform of the coinage. A new khani or tanga was to be issued
which would have a higher silver content and would be equal to a quarter of a rupee.
All religious and other officials of note were to be sent to Court where they would be
taken into the Emperor's service, the fortifications of Balkh were to be strengthened,
peasants and craftsmen were to be compensated for the crops damaged and for the
valuable objects taken by the invading army. Sa‘dallah was also to explain to them
that the Emperor's intervention was due to the purest motives, namely, to bring order
to the area. Finally the Emperor's representative was given a large sum of money
which he was to distribute to the Mughal soldiers and their leaders, and which
included rewards, as well as three months’ pay in advance.%”
While Sa‘dallah accomplished his mission, Shah Jahan wrote to Nadir
Muhammad to convince him that the conquest had been an altruistic attempt to save
the area from chaos. In the letter sent with Mir ‘Aziz on 20 August he tried to distance
himself from Murad Bakhsh's actions, which he described as marred by the
foolishness of youth. It was inconsiderate of his son to have sent his amirs into Balkh
when Nadir Muhammad was in residence. This was bound to have filled the khan
with fear. His son, Shah Jahan explained, had taken the Mughal army to Balkh in
order to pacify the vilayet and to ‘sweep it clear’ of rebellion. He had only come in
answer to Nadir Muhammad's request. He had been instructed to help the khan to
retake Bukhara, if he so wished, and he had been taken by surprise on hearing that
Nadir Muhammad had left for Marw. Shah Jahan declared that he would send Nadir
Muhammad's relatives to him wherever he might settle and they would be sent under
escort. For the moment they were being well looked after and those of his sons who
had gone to serve the Emperor were treated with respect. And with this rather
ambiguous declaration, which probably implied that the khan was not expected to

return to Balkh, the letter came to a close.%8
On 5 Sha‘ban/16

September

1646 Sa‘dallah returned to Kabul, his mission

accomplished. He had appointed governors to the various towns and fortresses. He
had sent two contingents of 5,000 men each to Qunduz and Andkhud, where the
Mughal troops had been under attack from Alman forces during August. He had also
despatched Nadir Muhammad's relatives under guard to Kabul, where they arrived on
9 September. Their party consisted of the khan's third son Bahram, his sixth son
‘Abd al-Rahmaan, Khusrau's son Rustam, and also, if Mughal historians are to be
credited, some of the khan's wives, concubines and daughters. The Emperor greeted
them all warmly. He gave them rich presents, appointed a tutor for ‘Abd al-Rahman,
es
to treat them all with respect and generosity, and then sent them off to
India.

97 Lahauri, II, 560-4. Muhammad Salih, ‘Amal II, 496-7. Khafi Khan, I, 637-8.
98 Hajji Mir, 259a-61a. Lahauri, II, 572-5. Khafi Khan, I, 640.
99 Lahauri, II, 564-71, 579-82, 584-5. Muhammad Salih, ‘Amal II, 498-500, 503-5. Hajji Mir's
evidence (239b-40b, 251b-2a) seems to indicate that none of the ladies of Nadir Muhammad's

household fell into the hands of the enemy, for he says that his ancestor took them to Bukhara as

soon as it was known that Murad Bakhsh had reached Qunduz. This is partly confirmed by
Lahauri, who says that Nadir Muhammad had ‘Abd al-‘Aziz's wife and daughters sent to Bukhara.

Hajji Mir includes Nadir Muhammad's mother among the ladies taken to Bukhara, and this is

240

1641-51

After hearing Sa‘dallah's report Shah Jahan felt satisfied that his conquest was
secure.

He decided

to leave Kabul

for Lahore,

but first he launched

a major

diplomatic offensive aimed at Iran. He had already sent Jan Nathar Khan to Isfahan in
April with a very flowery letter of condolences on the death of Shah Safi, in which he
also congratulated ‘Abbas II on his accession and expressed a wish for them to
continue exchanging letters and embassies. Now a second envoy, Arslan Bik, was

despatched on 9 Sha‘ban/20 September. He was to deliver a letter giving the
Emperor's own version
of the conquest and it was hoped that this would win ‘Abbas
II's approval and dissuade him from helping Nadir Muhammad. Shah Jahan
explained that he had intervened to put an end to disorder and rebellion, and in
particular to the killing of sayyids in Balkh and Badakhshan, a revelation which was
bound to make an impression on the Shi‘a monarch and on Khalifa Sultan, who was
known to be very devout. He made it clear that Nadir Muhammad's flight was the illconsidered action of a man overcome by totally unfounded fears, Prince Murad
having shown nothing but love for the older man. He spoke approvingly of the
Shah's respectful treatment of the old khan and appeared to believe that Nadir
Muhammad had been permitted to go from Isfahan to the Holy Places, for this is what
he wished “Abbas II to do. Finally he made it clear that he hoped, with Allah's help,

to take control of the rest of the khanate.1
The Emperor's letters to Nadir Muhammad and to the Shah arrived in Isfahan
after the khan had left to return to the khanate, and therefore cannot have influenced
the course of events, as intended. ‘Abbas II and his entourage in fact much resented
Shah Jahan's patronising tone and covert directives. However, since they had no
intention of being next on his list of conquests, they contented themselves with
sending a rather tart reply with Arslan Bik. This letter, which was probably sent not
long after the ambassador's arrival, was written for ‘Abbas II by Khalifa Sultan, and
showed anger as well as disbelief before the Emperor's excuses. First the young
monarch expressed surprise at the alleged atrocities committed in the khanate.
Although he acknowledged that the country had been in a state of turmoil before
Nadir Muhammad's flight, he added righteously that he had not thought it proper to
intervene, in view of the khan's weakness and of the fact that the khanate was at

peace with Iran. He angrily rejected, as unnecessary, the Emperor's suggestion that
he must show respect for Nadir Muhammad and help him. The Safawids, he retorted,
were known for their hospitality to their guests, this being a clear reminder of Shah
Tahmasp's hospitality to Shah Jahan's great-grandfather Humayun. In any case,
‘Abbas continued, Nadir Muhammad was not interested in the Holy Places. All he
wanted was revenge. The letter ended on a more cautious note, however, as the
Iranian ruler and his advisers were determined not to get drawn into the MughalBukharan conflict. Shah ‘Abbas made it clear that the khan had rejected his offers of
mediation and had even left for Khurasan and the khanate without consulting him.
Thus in effect he disclaimed all responsibility for Nadir Muhammad's actions.!0!
In fact, notwithstanding his show of righteous indignation, Shah ‘Abbas had
treated Nadir Muhammad most shabbily. Not only had he withdrawn the help
originally offered to his guest but, a mere two months after Nadir Muhammad left
Isfahan, he had decided to appropriate the gifts which Gribov was taking to the khan.

discussed below.

100 ]
jhauri, I, 493, 500, 595-602.
101 Rjazul Islam, A Calendar, I, 297-8.

241

Nadir Muhammad

Perhaps the Shah's cupidity had been excited by the Emperor's message and by his
gift of a rich bejewelled sword-hilt taken from Nadir Muhammad's Treasury by the
Mughal army. Whatever the reason, in January 1647 he asked Gribov to surrender
the gerfalcons, sables, black foxes and some of the clothlengths which he had been

taking to the khan.}02
Gribov was then in Mazandaran, where he had arrived in early December 1646,
on his way to visit the khanate for the second time. In view of the latest events which
had taken place in Khwarazm and in the khanate, the new Tsar, Aleksei, had decided
that his envoy should not risk taking the direct route via Karagan and Khiva. He sent
him instead through Iran, with instructions to assess the situation from there before

continuing to Ma wara’ al-nahr. In an attempt to facilitate Gribov's journey Tsar
Aleksei had given him a selection of accrediting letters, to be used as required. They
included a letter to Nadir Muhammad-ruler-of-Bukhara-and-Balkh, another to Nadir
Muhammad-ruler-of-Balkh, and others to ‘Abd al-‘Aziz, Aba ’1-Ghazi, Shah ‘Abbas,

and also the Iranian governors of Farabad, Astrabad, Mashhad and Marw.
The official aim of Gribov's mission was to announce the death of Tsar Mikhail in
July 1645 and his son's accession, but there were other reasons for sending him off

again, less than three years after his return to Moscow, and despite his poor reception
in the khanate in 1643. The Tsar wanted to maintain and develop his trade links and
good relations with the khanate. He hoped that the civil war, of which he had heard,
had sufficiently weakened the ruler of Bukhara, whoever he might be, to make him
relent towards the Muscovite captives. Perhaps the khan would be prepared to let
them go free in order to acquire an ally, even if that meant that some of them might
renounce the Muslim faith and return to the Orthodox religion. Tsar Aleksei also
wished to establish direct trade with Mughal India, and he accordingly asked Gribov
to make extensive enquiries about routes via the khanate, and about the likely

difficulties which traders might encounter on their way.!0 Finally he thought it
important to’ state clearly his friendly intentions and goodwill in case Nadir
Muhammad was worried about the many recent Bukharan and Khwarazmian
ambassadors to Muscovy, such as Khwajah Ibrahim and Amin Bahadur, who had
been stranded there for years.
There is no doubt that Muscovite bureaucratic procedures were at least partly
responsible for the excessive length of their stay. This was certainly the case with
regard to Amin Bahadur, who arrived in Astrakhan in November 1643 and was kept
there until the problem of his Customs dues was finally solved in May 1645.
Khwajah Ibrahim may also have had some difficulty in gathering the items requested
by “Abd al-‘Aziz. The greater part of the delay, however, seems to have been caused
by the hostility of the Qalmaq on the overland route and the Turkmen on the sea route.
The Turkmen, whose territory was situated between the Caspian and Khiva, had
become hostile to all travellers. Their hostility increased after a number of traders
from the Chabdur tribe were killed in Khiva in 1645. Since these killings had been
carried out by Khwarazmians, not Bukharans, and on Abu ’1-Ghazi's specific
instructions, Bukharan ambassadors ought not to have feared reprisals. And indeed
the Chabdur themselves bore no grudge against the people of the khanate. They even

102 TsGADA, fond 109, op.1, 1646 no.1, listy 18, 70, 86-88. Materialy po istorii russkoindiiskikh otnoshenii, 80. Muhammad Salih, ‘Amal, II, 507.

103 TsGADA, fond. 77, op.2, 1646 no.2, list 74b; fond 109, op. 1, 1646 no.2, listy 10, 14-19,
148.

242

1641-51

said in November 1645 that they intended to despatch a peace-making embassy to
Nadir Muhammad. However, the Salir Turkmen felt differently and considered both
Bukharans and Khivans as fair game. Not surprisingly therefore, although Khwajah
Ibrahim and his companions set sail from Astrakhan in September 1645, they refused
to land near Karagan, on the peninsula of Sarytash. They insisted instead on returning
to Muscovy and spent the winter in Astrakhan, much to the embarrassment of the
local authorities. When they began to leave the town in the spring of 1646, they
travelled separately and’avoided the Caspian.
Kuzai Nughai set off on 17/28 May and was sent along the river Bereket to
Yaitsk. He was accompanied by his wife, a suite of 10, the two slaves whom he had
purchased in Muscovy, and also three Bukharan merchants with their servants. The

party travelled under the protection of a pristav appointed by the Tsar, who was to
make sure that they neither purchased nor acquired any additional goods or slaves on
the way. It is not known whether Kuzai Nughai and his party had any problems
during their journey, but another of his fellow-ambassadors, Amin Bahadur, who
took the same route in September, was robbed and detained for some time by the
Qalmaq Dalantai, whose camp was situated about five stages from Yaitsk.
Tsar Aleksei was well aware that Kuzai Nughai's return journey was likely to be
long and difficult, because of the numerous Qalmaq and other ‘predators’ whom he
might meet en route. In order to ensure that the messages entrusted to him reached
Nadir Muhammad as soon as possible, the Tsar took the precaution of repeating them
verbatim in his instructions to Gribov, whom he despatched from Moscow less than
six weeks later, on 6 July 1646. Thus Gribov was told to inform Nadir Muhammad
that his ambassador had been well treated, that the Customs dues taken from Shaikh
Baba had been returned and that his demand for the Tsar's Noghay subjects was

inadmissible.1
In the event, however, Gribov did not get to the khanate. He remained in Iran and

did not see Nadir Muhammad, although both of them were ‘Abbas II's guests at the
same time, and although the khan sent for him from Marw some time in late March or
early April 1647. When asked by the Shah whether he would accept Nadir
Muhammad's invitation, Gribov simply said that he was unable to do so without
specific instructions from the Tsar, in view of the civil war in the khanate and the

khan's status as a refugee with no fixed abode. He was not swayed by the promise
that an escort would be provided as far as Marw and that the gerfalcons intended for
the khan, which he had been compelled to part with on 22 March, would be returned

to him. By then Gribov had been three weeks in Isfahan. He knew full well that
Nadir Muhammad's position was extremely precarious and that he was a king without
a kingdom. He also knew about the feud between the khan and his son, and had no

wish to get himself, or the Tsar, involved in it. In any case he had been sent to the
khanate, not to Marw. He realised that it would be impossible for him to travel to the
khanate through the theatre of war. And since Nadir Muhammad himself was
unwilling to trust his son and to return to Ma wara’ al-nahr, despite recent approaches
by ‘Abd al-‘Aziz, who suggested that they fight the Mughals together, Gribov
decided that it was safer for him to remain in Isfahan. He could still perform a useful
service for the Tsar by selling the goods which he had brought from Muscovy in
Isfahan or in Khurasan, while collecting most of the information required about

104 Thid., listy 24, 26.
243

Nadir Muhammad

events in the khanate and routes to India.!©
Nadir Muhammad's neighbours were of course following developments in the
khanate with keen interest. Abi ’1-Ghazi had taken full advantage of the civil war.
Not only had he seized Khwarazm, but, if we are to believe Shaikh Baba who
returned to Astrakhan as his envoy in November 1646, the new ruler of Khwarazm
had even written to Shah Jahan (presumably before the Mughal invasion began), to
suggest a joint attack on Balkh. Later Abi ’1-Ghazi had sent traders to supply the
Mughal conquerors of Balkh, which may explain why Shaikh Baba's predecessor,
Nadir Nadirlikov, had been able to take a sizeable quantity of Indian goods to
Moscow. At the same time, however, and despite his approaches to the Mughals,
Abi ’1-Ghazi had managed to establish a good relationship with ‘Abd al-‘Aziz, whom
he did not blame for his father's conquest of Khwarazm.
‘Abd al-‘Aziz, for his part, had attempted to get Abu ’1-Ghazi's support by
returning to him the members of the Khwarazmian ruling family who had been held in
the khanate since 1643. This well-calculated move had.borne fruit. In return Abu ’1Ghazi had encouraged his people to trade with the khanate and Shaikh Baba was able
to assure the Muscovite authorities in 1646 that ‘peace and friendly consultation’
reigned between his master and ‘Abd al-"Aziz.
Shaikh Baba used the same words to describe the state of ‘Abd al-‘Aziz's
relations with the Mughals, from which one can deduce that he must have made
friendly overtures to the Mughal invaders during the first months of their occupation
of Balkh.!°6 This may seem strange but it must be remembered that he was totally
estranged from his father and that his first priority will have been to ensure that the
Mughals did not continue their advance and attack the rest of the khanate. In any case,
when Murad Bakhsh entered Balkh ‘Abd al-‘Aziz was fully occupied fighting the
Qalmaq on his eastern frontier. These Qalmaq did not belong to the tribes camping
near Muscovy who had begun to plan a joint attack on Samara with Nadir Muhammad
in autumn 1645.!07 They were the followers of the kuntaidzhi Batur who, on hearing
of Nadir Muhammad's feud with his son, had thought the moment opportune for
launching another devastating attack on his enemy, the Qazaq Jahangir, in May 1646.
His campaign was initially very successful. In early June a Muscovite envoy to the
Qalmaq was told that the kuntaidzhi had recently fought the Qazaq ‘Yangir’, killing
many and taking scores of prisoners, including Jahangir's brother with his wife and
children.
!°8 Batur also captured the towns of Sairam and Turkestan and, according to
Hajji Mir, he even forced the Qazaqs to become his vassals. At this stage, and no
doubt to their dismay, “Abd al-‘Aziz arrived in the area with an army, having received
an appeal for help from Jahangir, who was in Tashkent.
Ever since Nadir Muhammad had failed to retake Hisar from him in autumn 1645,
‘Abd al-‘Aziz had felt secure as ruler of Bukhara. However, he had remained wary of
the Qazags, as likely to intervene on his father's behalf and was delighted, therefore,
when Jahangir appealed to him for help. He was quick to respond, leaving Bukhara
and marching to Turkestan and Sairam. And he was still there in July 1646 when
Nadir Muhammad, hearing of Murad Bakhsh's arrival in Qunduz, sent several
members of his harem to Bukhara for safety. The party, which was escorted by his
105 TsGADA, fond 109, op. 1, 1646 no.1, listy 73, 86, 110-3.
106 Materialy, 316, 317.
107 Thid., 310, 314.
108 Yaterialy po istorii russko-mongol'skikh otnoshenii, Il, 276.

244

1641-51

one of Hajji Mir's ancestors called Muhammad Yar Sultan, is said to have included

Nadir Muhammad's mother,!9 together with Subhan Quli's mother and ‘Abd al‘Aziz's wife. Leaving them in Bukhara Muhammad Yar went to ‘Abd al-Aziz to
announce their arrival, as well as the Mughal invasion. ‘Abd al-‘Aziz must have been
concerned to hear this news but, since he was too far away to intervene, and since his
army can hardly have matched the Mughal army in size, he took no action, although
he may have sent friendly greetings to Prince Murad at this stage as a propitiating
gesture. Remaining for’some time in the eastern provinces, ‘Abd al-‘Aziz continued to
fight the Qalmaq with grim determination, until he forced them to flee Sairam and
Turkestan, ‘miserable and disappointed’. Then, as soon as the Qazagqs returned to
‘take their place’ he returned triumphantly to Bukhara.
By this time his father was in Iran and the Mughals were busy trying to strengthen
their control over the province of Balkh. Satisfied that the Qazags would now be on
his side, “Abd al-‘Aziz ‘girded his loins with determination’ and began the long, slow
task of gathering an army in order to oust the enemy from Balkh.!!° Several months
went by before his preparations were complete, for he does not seem to have been
anxious to intervene. He even appealed to his father for help in this task, but without
success. ‘Abd al-‘Aziz may have been worried about the possible outcome of his
intervention because he knew he would get little support in Balkh, where religious
dignitaries and officials were doing their best to curry favour with the Mughals. Many
of them, and even Nadir Muhammad's brother-in-law, Khwajah ‘Abd al-Khaliq, had
undertaken the long journey to India from December 1646 in order to express their
devotion to Shah Jahan and in the hope of receiving rich presents from the

Emperor.!!! The only ones in the area who showed themselves determined not to
accept the Mughal conquest were the Alm4an, and ‘Abd al-‘Aziz may have been
reluctant to ask for their support. These hardy freebooters, who lived on the saddle
and depended upon the booty taken on raids, proved very effective in harassing the
conquerors. In September 1646 they carried out three raids on the Mughals at such
very different locations as Kelif on the Amu-Darya, Khulm in Badakhshan, and
Shiburghan. They even seized all the army's horses and camels within ten miles of
Balkh. Surely it would be worthwhile to make use of their help.
In December 1646 ‘Abd al-‘Aziz at last made up his mind. He sent an army under
Subhan Quli to join forces with the Alm4n and together they took Tirmidh. Although
they apparently did not keep the town for long, ‘Abd al-‘Aziz was well pleased with
their success, and he let it be known

that he intended to reconquer Balkh and

Badakhshan in the spring of 1647.112
On hearing this Shah Jahan decided to send his son Aurangzib to the area, not
only to see to its defence, but also to regain the initiative, which his troops had lost.
The Prince was despatched from Lahore on 20 February 1647 and once again ‘Ali

Mardan was asked to take part in the expedition.!!3 A month later Aurangzib arrived
109 Although Mahmid b. Wali (Ethé), 203b-4b, appears to place the death of Nadir Muhammad's
mother in 1040/1631, he does not mention her by name and may have had in mind another lady,
also very dear to the khan, perhaps his wet-nurse or his grandmother. Hajji Mir (137a, 139b,
251b), on the other hand, is explicit. Band Begim, who married Din Muhammad at Mashhad and
gave birth to Nadir Muhammad some time later, was taken to Bukhara for safety by his ancestor.

110 Yajji Mir, 252a.

111 | ahauri, II, 608-12, 624.
112 Lahauri, I, 613-24. Muhammad Salih, ‘Amal, II, 512-3. Khafi Khan, I, 649-51.
113 «Ajj Mardan seems to have returned to India some time after Murad Bakhsh's departure from
Balkh.

245

Nadir Muhammad
at Peshawar, and on 13 April he reached Kabul, from whence he set off for the

frontier on 17 April.!14
Shah Jahan followed his son to Kabul.!!5 He was very concerned about the
situation, for he knew that his troops were being harassed and that their morale was

low. According to an Iranian official from Khurasan, Allah Quli, who spoke to
Gribov in late November of that year, a convoy of 30,000 oxen laden with food and
money had been intercepted by the large army of ‘Bukharan, Uzbeg and Almanchi
soldiers’ which was then preparing to besiege Balkh under the command of ‘Abd al‘Aziz and Yalangtish Bi. This incident, which is not reported by Mughal

historians,!!6 was apparently so serious that, some time in March 1647,1!7 the

‘Indian soldiers who were sitting in Balkh’ sent secret messages to Nadir
Muhammad, who was himself in Maryzhan (Marw-i Shah Jahan), telling him to come
over as they intended to leave for India and to return Balkh to him. But Yalangtush

found out about the Mughal scheme and he ‘told’ the khan not to leave Marw. The
Mughals then allegedly offered Yalangtish a bribe of 30,000 tuman (ie., the
enormous sum of 3,750,000 to 4,285,714 tanga, or 165,000 to 257,142 roubles) if
he would leave the area with ‘Abd al-‘Aziz and his army, but he refused their offer.
And, although ‘Abd al-‘Aziz took some men away in order to defend Bukhara, which
had been attacked by the Qazaqs under the leadership of Jahangir, Yalangtush
remained near Balkh.!!8
After ‘Abd al-‘Aziz's departure the Mughals engaged Yalangtush in battle. This
battle, Allah Quli told Gribov, lasted a whole week and Yalangtish lost so many of

his men that he felt unable to continue the fight. The amir hastily wrote to ‘Abd alAziz, asking for help and suggesting that he make peace with Jahangir, prior to
bringing all the troops at his disposal over to Balkh. ‘Abd al-*Aziz did as he
suggested and even managed to persuade the Qazaq Prince to march with him to
Balkh. Their combined armies, together with a contingent of 2,000 Khwarazmians

sent by Aba ’1-Ghazi,!!9 gathered on the shores of the Amu-Darya and decided on a
plan which was sure to bring the Mughal defenders of Balkh to their knees. They
would foul the water of the river, because they knew this water to be essential for the
needs of the people and animals of the town. Killing large numbers of horses,
camels, sheep and dogs, they threw them in the river, and the result was as
devastating as they had hoped: - an epidemic broke out in the Mughal ranks, severely
depleting their forces. The combined Bukharo-Qazaq army then launched an attack
and this time, after another week-long battle, the Bukharan side was victorious. As a

result the Mughals were obliged to abandon the conquest and to withdraw to India.120
So much for Allah Quli's account in which, surprisingly enough, no mention is
made of Aurangzib's presence in the province during the last five months of the
Mughal occupation. Although this account is at variance with those of the major
114 |
ahauri, II, 632, 638, 670-1. Khafi Khan, I, 646, 658, places his arrival in Kabul on 21 April.
Muhammad Salih, ‘Amal, II, 514, gives the earlier date of 23 Dha ’1-hijja/30 January for
Aurangzib's appointment and the later date of 30 Rabi‘I/5 May for his arrival in Kabul.

115 Khafi Khan, I, 660.

116 Lahauri, II, 614-5, only admits to an unsuccessful attempt, presumably by the Alman, to take
the Mughals troops' pay some time in September-October 1646.

117 For this date see TSGADA fond 109, op.1, 1646 no.1, list 112.
118 TsGADA, fond 77, op.2, 1646 no.2, listy 33-36.
119 Tf troops were indeed sent over by Abi ’1-Ghazi, then he must have discontinued the support
which, according to Shaikh Baba, he had been giving to the Mughals in September 1646.

120 TsGADA, fond 77, op.2, 1646 no.2, listy 36-37.
246

1641-51

Mughal historians, it has the great advantage, which they lack, of giving a perfectly
valid reason for the retreat. Their determination to portray their side as uniformly
successful permits them only to mention temporary and very minor reverses, which
makes the retreat practically impossible to justify or explain. On the other hand, Allah
Quli, and the governor of Mashhad whom he represented, were not directly involved
in the conflict. They had no vested interest in making up such a detailed story of the
Mughal downfall. More to the point, a lot of their evidence is confirmed by other nonMughal sources, by contemporary letters from India and even, indirectly, by Lahauri
himself.
The only problem which this account fails to solve convincingly is that of the
negotiations conducted with Nadir Muhammad. Who can have started them and why?
It is difficult to believe that the ‘Indian soldiers’ would have offered Balkh back to
Nadir Muhammad, although there were definitely some disaffected elements in their

ranks, and others who are known to have hankered after returning to India.!2!
Bahadur Khan and Asalat Khan, who were loyal servants of the Emperor, are hardly
likely to have begun such negotiations without his prior permission. And had they
done so of their own accord, to gain time until reinforcements and instructions came
from India, they would have been severely disciplined by the Emperor, a fact which
was bound to have been recorded.
Not surprisingly Mughal historians insist that ‘Abd al-‘Aziz and Nadir
Muhammad opened the negotiations, at separate times, but in fact it seems that
Aurangzib took the initiative with an ambiguous missive drafted by Sa‘dallah Khan.
The Prince began by referring to the letter from Shah Jahan which Mir ‘Aziz had tried
to deliver to Nadir Muhammad about nine months earlier. He blamed ‘Abbas II for
preventing its delivery and included a copy for the khan's perusal, no doubt in order
to convince him of the sincerity of Shah Jahan's intentions. He went on to rebuke the
khan for fleeing to Iran and for taking umbrage at the ‘inconsiderate actions’ of certain
Mughal officers. He then declared that the khan's needs and desires would be
provided for, and that he would no longer have any cause for distress if he but
relinquished the area to the Emperor. Finally, Aurangzib promised to help in a way
befitting the khan's dignity. The last two statements were purposely ambiguous. They
could be taken to indicate that the province would in fact be returned to the khan if he
would accept the Emperor as overlord. And they may well have been included in the
letter on Shah Jahan's orders, as a stratagem expected to secure Nadir Muhammad's
co-operation and to stop him from joining forces with ‘Abd al-‘Aziz in the fight
against the Mughals. This letter was probably sent off in early June 1647, i.e.,
shortly after Aurangzib's arrival in the province of Balkh, and it was answered some

time in July.!22
If we turn now to the Mughal account of events in 1647, it seems clear that the
situation of the Mughal troops in the province seriously deteriorated while Aurangzib
was on his way. Nadir Muhammad had pressed the siege of Maimana for over two
months and had come very near to taking the town, only giving up on being told that

Aurangzib was approaching the province with fresh troops.!?? Bukharan and Alman
121 |
ahauri, II, 559. Warith, 12a.
122 Riazul Islam, A Calendar, Il, 253. Warith, 17b.
123 | ahauri, IJ, 662-4, says the siege lasted three months and ended on 9 Rabi‘I/14 April. This date
cannot be correct, as the same historian adds that it ended at a time when Bahadur Khan was out

of Balkh, having gone to meet Aurangzib, which means that the siege must have ended in late
May. In any case we know from Gribov's evidence that Nadir Muhammad was still in Marw in

247

Nadir Muhammad

forces had redoubled their efforts against the Mughals, subjecting them to continuous
harassment. In February together with Subhan Quli the Alman tried to storm the fort
of Kalta, north of Balkh. In March the Alman raided, first Aqcha and Saripul west of
Balkh, then Rustaq in the east, taking large numbers of horses, camels and cattle, all
of which, Lahauri would have us believe, were soon recovered by the Mughals.

These attacks were repeated again and again always in different places, the idea being
to deprive the Mughals of transport and food supplies, and also to cause panic in their
ranks. April and May 1647 were particularly busy, the Mughals coming under attack
at Ghuri, Taliqan, Andkhud, Kelif and Khanabad,!24 and ‘Abd al-‘Aziz himself
marching to within two miles of Balkh. This may have been because it was known
that Aurangzib was expected at Balkh and it was felt essential to secure a major
victory before his arrival.
The sieges of Taliqan and Khanabad were undertaken with particular vigour.
Even Lahauri, who generally says that every Alman gain was reversed within a day or
two, has to admit, with regard to Taliqan, that the fighting was hard, that there were
Mughals among the dead, and that the Mughals only retained the town because the
Alman became impatient and raised the siege. By then the fighting had lasted a whole
week,!25 and the townspeople were in fact within an ace of surrendering, the Alman
having diverted their water supply two days earlier.
Towards the end of May troops from both sides went to meet Aurangzib. Bik
Ughli was sent by ‘Abd al-‘Aziz to ambush the Mughal Prince at the Darra-yi Gaz
pass in the Elburz mountains some 8.5 miles south-east of Balkh, but the Mughal
amir Bahadur Khan set off on a very different errand - he wanted to pay his respects

and to escort the Prince to Balkh.!26
According to Lahauri and other Mughal sources, Nadir Muhammad was then
living in Bilchiragh (Belchirag), about 20 miles from Maimana. When he was told of
Bahadur Khan's departure for Darra-yi Gaz, it was also suggested that he should
make a bid for Balkh during the amir's absence, but he refused to take such a risk.
Instead he instructed his son Qutluq Muhammad to find out whether such a plan was
viable. The Prince set off as instructed, but his escort, who were apparently
disaffected elements from Bukhara, persuaded him that he should abandon his father
and defect to “Abd al-‘Aziz. Having met some of the men who were marching to
Darra-yi Gaz, he was told that ‘Abd al-‘Aziz was sending Subhan Quli to lead them to
victory and he decided that he would lead them into action himself in order to show
his mettle, as well as his newly-found devotion for ‘Abd al-‘Aziz. However, their
combined forces proved unable to stop Aurangzib. Despite two fierce battles on 30
May and 2 June, the Mughal Prince got through the pass, largely because of the fear
caused by his war elephants, who trumpeted loudly as they charged, and he arrived in

Balkh on 1 Jumada 1/4 June 1647.127

late March. TSGADA, fond 109, op.1, 1646 no.1, list 111. See also Khafi Khan, I, 656.

124 There seem to be two places with this name, one about half-way between Balkh and Kelif, the
other about 9 km from Aqcha.
125 This could have been the unsuccessful week of fighting which Gribov mentioned in connection
with Yalangtish.

126 Lahauri, I, 642-57. Muhammad Salih, ‘Amal, II, 517 and ff. Haji Mir, 256a-b. Harlan, 93,
places this pass 5 coss from Balkh, or 13 km.750 if the coss is taken as 2.75 km. See further
about this measurement in Burton, "Itinéraires", n.13.

127 |
ahauri, II, 666-8, 672-6, 686.
248

1641-51

Aurangzib did not waste much time at Balkh, for he knew that Bik Ughli's troops
had regrouped near Aqcha and that ‘Abd al-‘Aziz, who had left Qarshi some time
earlier, was on his way to join them. After taking into his service those of the
khwajahs who might be tempted to help the enemy, such as ‘Abd al-‘Aziz's spiritual
director, ‘Abd al-Ghaffar, he appointed a governor for the citadel because the
governor of the town, Sa‘id Khan, was seriously ill. Then he prepared his men for
battle and set off towards Aqcha on 5 Jumada I. Three days later, after building
bridges and crossing séveral rivers with geat difficulty, his vanguard arrived near
Timurabad where the ‘Uzbegs’ fell upon them from all sides, and a fierce battle

began.!28 The battle seems to have consisted of a series of lightning charges and
retreats by Qutluq Muhammad's men, which are scornfully dismissed by Lahauri.
But whether or not, as Lahauri suggests, Bahadur Khan's troops managed at an early
stage to take Qutluq Muhammad's tent, possessions and companions, the fighting
continued until nightfall and many were killed on both sides. In the end, however, the
Mughals carried the day, thanks to two furious elephants whom Aurangzib sent over
to lead his troops into action.
The following day another battle took place at Pasha'i, nearer to Aqcha and
although, according to Lahauri, the Uzbegs again attacked with great ‘impudence’,
this time under Bik Ughli, at the end of the day ‘all the tents, possessions, horses,
camels and other livestock of the Uzbegs fell into the hands’ of the Mughals.
Muhammad Salih claims that Aurangzib was able to camp that night in the Uzbegs'
camp, but in fact straight after the battle the Prince was told that Bik Ughli and Qutluq
Muhammad were on their way to attack Balkh with Subhan Quli, so he left at once,
ordering his army to hurry back to Balkh. This was not easy, for they had to fight all

the way.!29 The return journey took a week.!30 They were ambushed several times
by the Uzbeg troops, their camp was entered and most of their luggage seized, and at
least two major battles were fought after the Uzbeg side was joined by Yalangtish

and ‘Abd al-‘Aziz on 13 Jumada/16 June.!3! The fighting was centred round
‘Aliabad, Faizabad and Yangi Ariq near the river Balkhab, and the Bukharans and

Alman always took the initiative, although Lahauri invariably concludes that they
suffered far greater losses than the Mughals.
‘Towards the end of this week “Abd al-‘Aziz began to negotiate with Aurangzib.
This was not out of desperation, as Lahauri would have us believe, but because, as

revealed by Khafi Khan, !22 he realised that Aurangzib intended to give the province
away. ‘Abd al-‘Aziz must have found out that Aurangzib had written to Nadir
Muhammad with this in mind, and he was determined to put forward his brother and
heir, Subhan Quli, as an alternative ruler for the area. In any case, if Lahauri is to be
credited, it seems that ‘Abd al-‘Aziz was in serious danger of losing the greater part of
the Alm4n in his army. Disappointed to hear that peace was in the offing, they wished

to return to their encampments and were only persuaded to stay when they were
permitted to sell horses to the Mughal army. ‘Abd al-‘Aziz tried to keep Aurangzib
from entering Balkh by sending Yalangtish and Bik Ughli to hold talks with him one

128 Possibly Timurak, about a third of the way there.

129 |
ahauri, II, 687-94. Muhammad Salih, ‘Amal, II, 538-45. Khafi Khan, 661-6.
ghauri, II, 688, 697. Muhammad Salih, ‘Amal, Il, 538, 546. Qipchag Khan, 274b, says it took
130 |

50 days. He adds that there were Qazaq forces in ‘Abd al-‘Aziz's army, which confirms Allah
Quili's version of events.
131 Yajji Mir, 254a-b, says ‘Abd al-‘Aziz won a major victory on that day.

132 Khafi Khan, I, 669.

249

Nadir Muhammad
stage from the town, but Aurangzib declined to negotiate before reaching Balkh. He
knew that he would obtain reinforcements there and that he would be in a stronger
position to resist further attacks.
In fact Aurangzib was exhausted, as was his army. He had been marching for
nearly four months continuously and the fighting had gone on for 9 days in a
devastated province where food and water were so scarce that they had to be

purchased.!33 He was only too pleased to negotiate, but he answered “Abd al-‘Aziz
evasively by saying that he would have to refer the suggestion to his father. And he
continued towards Balkh.
When Aurangzib entered Balkh, ‘Abd al-‘Aziz thought it prudent to retire beyond
the Amu-Darya where he waited for an answer to his peace initiative.134 But the
Emperor did not answer, because he thought it essential to appear consistent. If he
was forced to give up his conquest he would only return it, duly ‘pacified’ by his
army, to its rightful ruler, Nadir Muhammad.
In Balkh meanwhile Aurangzib assessed his position and became fully aware of
the seriousness of his predicament. There was a grave shortage of food in the
province, most of the crops having been purposely ruined by Alman raids. The
country was on the brink of rebellion. The Mughal amirs, tired out after months of

harassment, had lost the initiative and could only agree to fight off attacks on their
positions. The enemy seemed to have inexhaustible supplies of troops, which were in
far better condition than theirs. Aurangzib wrote to his father explaining the situation.
He also stated his own desire to return to India and to fight in Deccan, where not only
fame, but fortune might be gained, and he suggested that the occupation should come
to an end. Shah Jahan reluctantly agreed with this suggestion, but, in order to save
face, he made it a condition that Nadir Muhammad should humbly express his
obedience to him. He also demanded that the 54-year-old monarch come to Balkh to
receive the province back from the hands of the 29-year-old Mughal Prince. Well
aware that the khan might refuse to accept such humiliating conditions the Emperor
took alternative steps in the hope of saving the situation. He wrote to Murad Bakhsh
on 5 Jumada II/8 July 1647 warning him that he might have to reinforce Aurangzib, if

and when this became necessary.135
Nadir Muhammad, who had lost the support of all his sons, had been tempted by
Aurangzib's ambiguous offer of assistance. To recover Balkh, even at the cost of
becoming the Emperor's vassal, was still better than being a ruler without a kingdom.
However, he had not hurried with an answer. He waited first to see how ‘Abd al-

‘Aziz's army fared in its confrontation with the Mughals. When he was told that
Aurangzib had only just held his own, that his army was suffering from hunger and
demoralisation, and that ‘Abd al-‘Aziz was trying to put Subhan Quli on the throne of
Balkh in his place, he wrote back at last. His letter has unfortunately not survived, but

judging from Khafi Khan's paraphrase it seems that he not only sent his humble
submission, but also expressed a wish to meet Aurangzib and to co-operate with him.
When the contents of this letter were relayed to Shah Jahan, he was delighted. He at

133 Lahauri, II, 670. He had left Lahore on 15 Mubarram/20 February. Khafi Khan, I, 668, says that
for 17 or 18 days there had been no rest from fighting for either man or beast, but in fact there
had been a few days' rest in Balkh after the encounter at Darra-yi Gaz, and the fighting had only
started again at Timurabad.

134 Lahauri, II, 694-702, 705-7. Khafi Khan, I, 666-71. Muhammad Salih, ‘Amal, II, 545-52. Hajji

Mir, 253a-4b.

135 Warith, 12a-b. Khafi Khan, I, 673. Muhammad Salih, ‘Amal, II, 552-3; Ill, 5.

250

1641-5]
once cancelled his instructions to Murad Bakhsh, sent this Prince to Kashmir and

ordered Aurangzib to continue with the negotiations136
.

Aurangzib accordingly despatched a certain Imam Khwajah to the khan with an
oral message, and this made Nadir Muhammad even more anxious to meet the Prince,
or so he said in his answering letter 137 However, he asked for the baqawal Tahir,
whom Mughal sources generally call Tahir Khan and describe as a well-spoken man,
to be sent to him first, presumably so that they could discuss all the details of the
surrender. This was probably the same baqawil Tahir who had been sent to take over
Khwarazm in 1642 and had led a mission to Iran in 1644-5, and although it is not
clear how a reliable official who fought for Nadir Muhammad during the civil war
came to be with Aurangzib at the time, the khan would have certainly valued his view
of Aurangzib's intentions.
On 19 Jumada II/22 July the baqawil Tahir set off on his mission, accompanied
by a certain ‘Ata Allah bakhshi and Uraz Kildi, who delivered to the khan a swordhilt covered with jewels as a gift from the Prince. This was Aurangzib's third
embassy to Nadir Muhammad. The baqawil Tahir brought Nadir Muhammad a very
cordial letter from Aurangzib who declared that he looked forward to their meeting
even more eagerly than the khan himself. He assured Nadir Muhammad that he would
be perfectly safe on his way to Balkh, that the Emperor had the greatest concern for
his welfare and that all his problems would be solved. In order to encourage the khan
to keep his promise, Aurangzib then reminded him that he had lost the support of
Qutluq Muhammad and told him in conclusion that the combined forces of the
(Alman) rebels, Subhan Quli and ‘Abd al-‘Aziz had been defeated and had fled across

the Amu-Darya.
138
This incorrect bit of information did not produce the expected result. On the
contrary, it turned out to have been a mistake, for Nadir Muhammad seems to have
taken fright at the thought that not a single soldier from Ma wara’ al-nahr would be in
the province when he reached Balkh. Before placing himself at Aurangzib's mercy,
he decided to obtain some sort of guarantee of the Prince's sincerity and he asked for
the town of Maimana to be made over to him. Aurangzib politely declined his request,
declaring that the khan would receive the whole of the province as soon as he signed
the agreement required by the Emperor. Nadir Muhammad was bitterly disappointed,
but his amirs persuaded him not to break off negotiations. He dismissed ‘Ata Allah
and sent two ambassadors to Aurangzib with what appears to have been an amended
version of the agreement. The Prince agreed to these amendments and sent the
document back with a letter in which he protested that their friendship was
unimpaired. He also repeated that Shah Jahan only intended to help the khan, and said
that ‘suitable measures’ would be taken after their (historic) meeting.
In early September Nadir Muhammad at last set off to meet the Prince. By then it
was over two months since the negotiations had started and a major famine had
broken out in Balkh. Gribov was told that bread, if available, cost 7 roubles (about
116.6 tanga) for a ‘shah's batman’ weighing 14 Russian lb, or 5.73 kg.199 And

136 Khafi Khan, I, 673.

137 This letter was delivered by Kafsh Qalmaq's brother Uraz Kildi.
138 warith, 11b-12a, 17b-18a. Riazul Islam, A Calendar, II, 258, 255. Muhammad Salih, ‘Amal,
Ill, 10-11.
139 TsGADA,

fond 77, op.2, 1646 no.2, list 37. See Burton, Bukharan

Trade, 87, for the tanga

equal to 12 den'gi in 1643. TsGADA, fond 134, op.1, 1641 d.2, list 130. It might be interesting

to note that in 1643 the value of the 5,000 batman of grain (between 4,320 and 33,000 kg,

251

Nadir Muhammad

according to Muhammad Yisuf Munshi an ass's load sold for 1,000 rupees (4,000
tanga).!40 A spell of severe cold made matters worse. Aurangzib was anxious to get
his troops out of Balkh before the winter set in, for if we are to credit Muhammad

Yusuf Munshi, his soldiers were already reduced to burning dead bodies in stoves in
order to heat themselves. When the Prince was told that Nadir Muhammad was taking
his time and spending several days at every staging-post on his way to Balkh from
Bilchiragh, he lost patience. Sending Bahadur Khan and the army to meet him at
Shiburghan he gave them very clear instructions: they must show the khan every sign
of respect if he agreed to go to Balkh with them, but if he did not, they must attack
him and put the fear of God in him so that he would never dare come back again.
Nadir Muhammad was understandably concerned when he heard that the Mughal
army was coming to meet him. Unwilling to be bullied, he sent ahead his faithful
amir, Kafsh Qalmaq. Kafsh Qalmagq asked on his behalf for the fort of Shiburghan to
be vacated by the army and for the army to move its camp one day's march away in
the direction of Balkh, adding that Nadir Muhammad would meet Aurangzib near this

town at a spot called Jumnal Baba.!4!The Mughals complied with this request and
sent Kafsh Qalmaq back with a gift of money for the khan. However, Nadir
Muhammad changed his mind. Hearing that Aurangzib had gone to Faizabad, he
decided to meet him there instead. The new venue was agreed, but at the last minute
Nadir Muhammad did not turn up. Pleading a sudden indisposition, he sent his
grandson Qasim Muhammad to take his place, accompanied by ‘Abdi Khwajah,
Kafsh Qalmaq and another of this faithful supporter's brothers, whose name was

Atesh Qalmaq.
Aurangzib was angry to have been deprived of the psychological victory required
by his father, but in view of the lateness of the season and the impossibility of
delaying the retreat any further he concealed his anger and disappointment. He agreed
to hand the province over to Qasim Muhammad, who was after all a member of the
ruling family and also a former governor of Khwarazm. In order to preserve his own
dignity, however, he did not go himself to meet the younger man. He entrusted this
task to his son, Muhammad Sultan, who accordingly set off in the company of
Bahadur Khan. When Qasim Muhammad and his party were taken to Aurangzib on 4
Ramadan/3 October, he treated them kindly. Then he summoned over the governors
of Andkhud and Maimana, and the retreat began on 11 Ramadan/10 October.142

according to the type of batman used) which Gribov was sent by Nadir Muhammad was assessed

as 12,550 tanga which means that the cost of a ‘shah's batman’ would have been something
between 2.18 and 16.65 tanga. In Muscovy, according to Klyuchevskii ("Russkii rubl'", pass.)
the price of grain in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, varied between 40 and 190
den'gi i.e. well under 1 rouble (200 den'gi) per chetvert', or 77 kg 800, which means that the cost
of a ‘shah's batman’ would have been something between 2.95 and 13.98 den'gi.

140 Muhammad Yisuf Munshi, 264b, 303a. This was 100 times more than it was worth in 1688.

Unfortunately the exact weight of an ass's load is not known. Davidovich, Materialy po
metrologii, 105, 105n., only accepts as definitive a weight given for the kharwar in fourteenth
century Khwarazm where it was 103.125 kg, but adds that it could be as much as 170-175 kg.
This ties up with the oral information supplied by Jack Alazrachi, a former wholesale flour

importer in Morocco, who said that the weight carried by donkeys in the 1940s and 1950s was

between 150 kg to 200 kg. But in the late nineteenth century the load of an ishak or donkey in
Central Asia was said by Russian officials to be 4 to 5 pud, i.e., between 65.32 and 81.90 kg.
"Torgovye i karavannye puti", 124-5,
141 Not identified.

142 Warith, 18a-19b. Khafi Khan, I, 675, places the Prince's departure on 14 Sha‘ban/14 September.

252

1641-51

Before leaving for India Aurangzib gave Qasim Muhammad a bejewelled sword-hilt,
a horse caparisonned in gold, and 50,000 rupees. According to Warith, he also left a
very large supply of wheat for Nadir Muhammad, a rather unlikely parting gift when
his army was starving and about to undertake a lengthy retreat in unfavourable
conditions. However, it may be that it was impractical to carry the wheat, in which
case Aurangzib thought that a generous gesture was worthwhile and would make a

lasting impression on the people of the khanate.!43
The retreat was as difficult as had been feared, partly because of the intense cold,
and partly because the Mughals were constantly harassed on their way. According to
Mughal historians, both ‘Uzbegs’ (people from the khanate) and Hazara tribesmen
were responsible for this harassment, the ‘Uzbegs’ carrying out four attacks between
Balkh and Ghurband, and the Hazara attacking several times, and even for a while at
hourly intervals, during the crossing of the Hindu Kush. The same historians put the
army's losses during the retreat at 5,000 men and 5,000 horses, but they are likely to
have given conservative figures for reasons of prestige. Gribov's informant, on the
other hand, quoted exaggerated figures for the sake of effect. Thus Allah Quli makes
the improbable claim that as many as 150,000 men were lost out of a total of
153,000, when in fact the original army had numbered only 60,000 and a smaller
number would no doubt have been sent with Aurangzib. Gribov was also told that the
Indian soldiers taken alive were later sold in the khanate as slaves, fetching no more
than five to six roubles apiece because of the large numbers available. As for the
troops that harassed the Mughals, his information was that they were led by no less a
figure than “Abd al-‘Aziz himself, together with Yalangtish, and also the Qazaq
Yangir/Jahangir. If true this would explain the heavy casualties sustained by the
Mughals during the retreat. Gribov actually took the trouble to have Allah Quli's
information checked, except for the figures quoted, and found that it was entirely
correct. But Mughal historians completely fail to mention “Abd al-‘Aziz's contribution
to the débadcle of Aurangzib's army, because they preferred to give the impression
that ‘Abd al-‘Aziz had fled the area, demoralised by his lack of success and in fear of

the Mughal army.!“4
It took Aurangzib
Shawwal/9 November
campaign had been a
million) rupees,!46 and

nearly a month
and the remnants
costly exercise.145
lost men, weapons

to reach Kabul. He arrived there on 10
of his army joined him 12 days later. The

The Mughals had spent about 5 krar (50
and beasts of burden. They also suffered a

Muhammad Salih, ‘Amal, III, 12-14, says he left on 14 Ramadan/13 October.
143 Warith, 20a, gives a figure of 50,000 mann of grain for the wheat left behind, which he says was
worth 5 laks/500,000 rupees, but he does not specify the type of mann he had in mind, and its
weight varied enormously, from 864 gr for the smallest Bukharan mann to as much as 33.546
kg for the mann-i Shah Jahan. At this stage in his career Aurangzib was keen to put himself
forward as a model of courage and generosity. Thus, according to Varma ("Mughal Imperialism",
262), some time before the retreat he calmly performed ritual prayers in the middle of a raging
battle.

144 TsGADA, fond 77, op.2, 1646 no.2, listy 38-39. Muhammad Yusuf Munshi, 265a, does not
mention the Qazaqs' contribution towards harassing the Mughals, but this may have been
omitted deliberately so as not to diminish his countrymen's achievement.

145 Muhammad Salih, ‘Amal, III, 14-17. Khafi Khan, I, 677, gives figures of 5,000 to 6,000 for the
human casualties, and 4,000 to 5,000 for the beasts of burden which perished. He also places the
Prince's arrival in Kabul earlier, on the first of Shawwal. Warith, 20b-22b gives a total of 5,000
men, plus 10,000 horses, camels and elephants, as the Mughal losses.

146 warith, 20b, gives a figure of 20 krar khani (i.e., 5 krar rupees) which he equates with 14 laks

253

Nadir

Muhammad

serious loss of prestige as a result of their failure to retain control of the provinces of
Balkh and Badakhshan. However, the consequences were not totally negative. If
anything relations between the khanate and India improved as a result. Nadir
Muhammad knew that Shah Jahan would not be in a hurry to invade again, so he felt
able to ask him for help. The Emperor was forced to respond positively in order to
justify his version of the invasion as an altruistic attempt to help the khan. Trade
between the two countries also flourished and the Emperor's generosity towards the
khanate's clergy and officialdom encouraged them to send over regular missions. For
his part Aurangzib had made a friend of Khwajah ‘Abd al-Ghaffar, with whom he
corresponded for years. Thanks to the influential knwajah he was kept informed
about events in the khanate, his agents were helped in their trade missions, and his
own version of developments in India was passed on for local consumption.
‘Abd al-‘Aziz, on the other hand, was disappointed with the outcome of the war,
for he had gained no territory and his father was again in control of Balkh. On his
return to Bukhara, he decided to remove his father from the province. First, however,

he thought it essential to win the support of Iran. He was concerned to know that the
army sent to accompany Nadir Muhammad back to Marw had not disbanded and that
his father was writing to the Shah, asking for grain to be sent to the devastated

province of Balkh.!47 When he heard that the Alman had carried out a raid on the
province of Mashhad, he sent two ambassadors to Isfahan in quick succession to
disclaim any involvement in their action and to express his friendly intentions. His
first message, sent with Muhammad Mustafa, was so graciously received and
reciprocated that “Abd al-‘Aziz thought it worthwhile sending over a consignment of
rich gifts with another envoy.!48 Gribov, who was in Isfahan when this second
envoy, the qush begi Hasan, arrived in December 1647, reported fully on his
embassy. An elegant ‘marquee’ opposite the palace was allocated to him and guarded
by the highest officials in the land. Some of his suite were even given rooms in the
Shah's palace. His gifts included a golden casket said to be full of jewels, several
sheepskins, goat hides, turbans and valuable sashes, in addition to 50 one-humped
camels and 20 amblers. ‘Abbas II was so pleased with these presents that, in a
deliberate attempt to insult Shah Jahan in the person of his envoy, he had Hasan
placed at table above Jan Nathar Khan, whom he had in any case kept in Isfahan for a

year.
Hasan brought a message of friendship from ‘Abd al-‘Aziz and a very tempting
offer. The Bukharan ruler was willing to retake Qandahar for the Shah in gratitude for
“Abbas II's part ‘in clearing (the Mughals from) Balkh’. The Shah and Khalifa
Sultan, who knew how little they had in fact helped Nadir Muhammad, must have
been somewhat puzzled, if grateful, for this offer. They had certainly resented Shah
Jahan's intimation that they must not help Nadir Muhammad. As for his request in
1644 for the son of ‘Ali Mardan, the traitor who had surrendered Qandahar to him,
this had been met with scorn and anger by Khalifa Sultan's predecessor. Ever since
1638 the Iranians had hoped to reconquer Qandahar and the time seemed particularly
appropriate for this task, as Shah Jahan's army was still reeling from its losses in the
khanate. An offer of support from a disaffected Indian Prince, apparently received at

tuman, but according to ‘Inayat Khan (Elliott, VII, 79) they only spent 2 krar rupees which he
equates with 7 laks timan.

147 TsGADA, fond 77, op.2, 1646 no.2, list 39.
148 Muhammad Tahir Wahid, Munsha’at, 17b, 18b.

254

1641-51

about the same time,!4? was a further encouragement to act. ‘Abd al-‘Aziz having

included a more practical suggestion in his letter, namely that they should lead their
combined armies to Qandahar and fight the Mughals together, ‘Abbas II took this up.
He despatched an envoy to Bukhara whom he instructed to agree to the suggestion
and also to find out the time and place where the two monarchs and their armies

should meet.15°

On 12 December 1647, Jan Nathar Khan was at last sent back to India. According
to Gribov he was given a sabre as a hint of the Shah's hostility for Shah Jahan and a
message in which ‘Abbas II demanded the evacuation of Qandahar, and threatened the
Emperor with war if this did not take place. Meanwhile, confident that his embassies
to Isfahan would establish a friendly rapport between himself and Shah ‘Abbas, ‘Abd
al-‘Aziz made a first attempt at ousting his father from Balkh. After gathering an army
he set off from Bukhara, but the Qazaq Jahangir's son arrived unexpectedly on a visit
and ‘Abd al-‘Aziz had to return to the capital to look after his visitor.!5!1 The
expedition was not abandoned, however. The former governor of Tashkent, Baqi
Yuz, was instructed to round up the horses of the Alman near Tirmidh in preparation
for an attack on Balkh, and Subhan Quli was sent to take Khulm. But they both failed
in their endeavours. Although Baqi Yuz's troops were twice as numerous as Nadir
Muhammad's, they were defeated. Many prisoners were taken, some of whom Nadir
Muhammad later set free, no doubt in order that his success might be made known.
His delight was premature, however, for the Alamanchei (Alman) apparently
returned soon after their defeat and caused havoc in the area, preventing the free
passage of men and goods between Bukhara and Balkh, and even killing traders to
seize their goods. And Baqi Yuz, who had withdrawn to Tirmidh, came back to the
attack some months later.
Subhan Quli did not reach Khulm and his failure was even more spectacular.
Nadir Muhammad sent Kafsh Qalmaq to meet him en route and to deliver a letter full
of tempting promises in which he was asked to come and comfort his father in his old
age. The twenty-year-old Prince fell into the trap, went to Balkh and was at once
placed under house arrest.!52 This gave Nadir Muhammad a useful breathing-space,
but in late May 1648 Baqi Yuz, who had spent the previous three to four months in
Tirmidh, crossed the Amu-Darya with a large army. According to the usual “Uzbeg’
practice he had been waiting for the spring when there would be sufficient grazing for
his horses.He marched straight to Balkh and began the siege of the town on 10
Jumada I/2 June 1648. In the meantime Shah Jahan made preparations to help Nadir
Muhammad. As soon as he was told in January that ‘Abd al-‘Aziz had sent troops
towards Balkh, he sent reinforcements to ‘Ali Mardan in Kabul and told him to be
ready to intervene. But in the event these troops were not needed, for no appeal for
help was received from Balkh. On 20 Sha‘ban/9 September 1648, after besieging the

149 TsGADA, fond 77, op.2, 1646 no.2, listy 39, 46-48. Gribov was told that the Indian Prince in

question was ‘of the Qizilbash persuasion’, (i.e. a Shi‘a) and that he offered to give Qandahar to
the Shah. See Riazul Islam, A Calendar, 1, 289, for the Iranian minister's response to the
request for ‘Ali Mardan's son.

150 TsGADA, fond 77, op.2, 1646 no.2, listy 49-50. Muhammad Tahir Wahid, Munsha’at, 19b.

No suggestion for joint action is included in the letter written by the Shah, but it may well be
that the message paraphrased by Gribov was meant to be delivered orally.

151 Gribov (TsGADA, fond 77, op.2, 1646 no.2, list 41) says that the Qazaq, who had atually come

to stay at Yalangtish Bi's, ‘told’ (ordered) ‘Abd al-‘Aziz not to go and fight his father himself.

152 TsGADA, fond 77, op.2, 1646 no.2, list 41. Muhammad Salih, ‘Amal, III, 95.

DSS

Nadir Muhammad

town for over three months, during which daily battles took place between his men

15? The first round
and the garrison, Baqi Yuz gave up his undertaking and withdrew.

had gone to Nadir Muhammad.
‘Abd al-‘Aziz's diplomatic offensive was more

successful than his Balkh
campaign. When his third envoy to Iran arrived in Isfahan on 12 March 1648,!54 he
delivered a letter in which ‘Abd al-‘Aziz suggested that ‘Abbas II set off without delay
towards Qandahar, and that they meet somewhere between Mashhad and Balkh. No

doubt he felt confident that he would have taken Balkh by the time this meeting took
place. He also revealed that the Mughal envoy Jan Nathar Khan and his party had a
very difficult return journey. Jan Nathar had in fact lost so many men due to the
severe weather that ‘Abd al-‘Aziz had thought it necessary to provide him with a
military escort as far as Qandahar, in order to protect his large consignment of official
goods.
On hearing this ‘Abbas II hastened with his preparations, for he did not want to
be robbed of the glory of leading a successful campaign against Qandahar. He left
Isfahan on 30 March 1648, taking with him the qush begi Hasan, while Gribov

remained behind, to be sent off by Khalifa Sultan.!55
Before leaving the Shah received ambassadors from Abu ’1-Ghazi, Nadir
Muhammad and the Turkmen.!5®According to the Iranian historian Muhammad
Yusuf Walih these embassies were propitiating gestures sent in fear of the Shah, who
might have decided to attack Khwarazm, Balkh or the Turkmen on his way to or from
Qandahar. This may have been true in the case of Abi ’1-Ghazi, who had repeatedly
and treacherously put to death large numbers of Turkmen, for the Shah might well
have championed their remaining brethren in order to extend his sovereignty to the
lands west of the Amu-Darya. Fear may have also played a part in determining the
despatch of the Turkmen envoys. They represented some 60,000 nomads, who had
moved to Khurasan and had later tried to return to the province of Balkh with Nadir
Muhammad in January 1647, only to be prevented from doing so by the then
governor of Marw, Allah Quli Khan. In case Shah ‘Abbas intended to punish them
for their ungratefulness they probably thought it wise to send warm messages of
devotion.
Nadir Muhammad's motives for sending ambassador Mehdi Khwajah to the
Shah, on the other hand, seem to have been more complex. If he knew about ‘Abd alAziz's embassies to Iran, he may have feared that ‘Abbas IT had been won over and
was marching to help his son to take Balkh. He ought to have realised, however, that
the Shah was unlikely to side with “Abd al-‘Aziz against him, for two reasons.
Firstly, the Safawid monarch's prestige would suffer if he severed his recently

established diplomatic links with the ruler of Balkh without a valid reason. Secondly,
if he did so, his previous behaviour towards Nadir Muhammad as a fugitive would be

open to question. But whether or not Nadir Muhammad knew and was concerned
about his son's approaches to ‘Abbas II, there were other important reasons for
153 TsGADA, fond 77, op.2, 1646 no.2, list 50. Muhammad Salih, ‘Amal, III, 95. Warith, 45a,
70b-7 1a. Khafi Khan, I, 682-3.

154 Hajji Mir, 257b-8b. At about this time Nadir Muhammad's Mother was buried in Mashhad with
full honours.

155 TsGADA, fond 77, op.2, 1646 no.2, listy 51 (wrongly numbered list 40), 55.

156 Thid., listy 54-55. Gribov states definitely that Nadir Muhammad's envoy saw the Shah at
Isfahan. The interviews with the other ambassadors are mentioned by Muhammad Tahir Wahid
(‘Abbasnama, 96), who suggests that they all took place after the Shah had left Isfahan.

256

1641-51

despatching Mehdi Khwajah, namely the desperate shortage of food supplies in
Balkh, which had been aggravated by recent Alman activities, and the need to press

for the return to Balkh of those refugees who had fled to Khurasan during the recent

upheavals in the khanate, as they would provide the province and its ruler with useful

manpower.

Shah ‘Abbas warmly greeted all the ambassadors, and even sent ambassadors of

his own to Balkh and Khiva, but although he may have written to ‘Abd al-‘Aziz to
suggest that he make peace with his father, he did nothing about returning the Balkh
refugees.!57 In his disappointment Nadir Muhammad turned to the Sultan for help.
He wrote to inform him of the unfortunate series of events which had recently taken
place in the khanate, from his son's seizure of Bukhara to the Mughal invasion. He
explained that, although the Mughals had been ousted from the khanate, he was still at
loggerheads with his son. And he asked the Sultan to exert his influence on two
counts - to effect a reconciliation between himself and ‘Abd al-‘Aziz and to persuade
the Shah to send the refugees back to Balkh. This message was taken to Istanbul by
“Abd al-Manan, who delivered a rich assortment of gifts to the new Sultan, sevenyear-old Mehmet IV, on 30 March 1649. These gifts had been meant for Sultan
Ibrahim, who particularly loved luxury and good living, and whose extravagance had
resulted in his murder in August 1648. However, the 5 cups, bejewelled dagger and
sabre, 10 racehorses and 27 lengths of gold-embroidered material brought by ‘Abd alManan appear to have impressed Mehmet IV's entourage, as did the tablecloth woven
with gold thread and the 5 horse-blankets embroidered with gold. Nadir Muhammad
had lost none of his panache! As a result of his generosity and the persuasiveness of
his ambassador several letters were despatched from Istanbul within 14 days of ‘Abd
al-Manan's arrival. Shah “Abbas, Shah Jahan and ‘Abd al-‘Aziz were all urged to put
an end to the feud between Nadir Muhammad and his son. Shah ‘Abbas was also
asked to discourage attacks on the frontiers of the khanate and to return the ‘Uzbeg’

refugees to Balkh.!58
Well before ‘Abd al-Manan reached Istanbul Qandahar had fallen to Shah ‘Abbas.

On his way there, feeling confident of success, he had despatched a taunting letter to
Shah Jahan from Mashhad. In this letter, which ambassador Shah Quli Bik was asked
to deliver, ‘Abbas II expressed mock admiration for the Emperor's generosity in
giving back ‘Balkh and Turkestan’ to Nadir Muhammad, despite the great effort
which his armies had earlier expended in conquering them. He would take a leaf out
of the Emperor's book and emulate his generosity. In accordance with the rules of
friendship he had given orders for the Treasury of Qandahar to be (similarly) returned
to Shah Jahan (after the town was conquered) and the people of both countries would

then live in peace and security.159
Despite the warning conveyed by Jan Nathar in late May 1648 Shah Jahan failed
to realise the seriousness of the Iranian threat. Only after the letter which Shah Quli
Bik delivered in Qandahar on 9 September reached him did he send reinforcements to
the town and give orders for a further 70,000 men to be gathered. And although he
had been told that Shah ‘Abbas intended to march on Qandahar in Dai and Bahman
(December and January), Shah Jahan simply refused to believe that this could be so.

157 Muhammad Yisuf Walih, 194a-b. Muhammad Tahir Wahid, ‘Abbasnama, 97. TSGADA, fond

109, 1646 no.1, list 84.
158 Faridin Beg, II, 150-3, 355-9, 343-4. Hammer, Geschichte, III, 346-7.
159 Muhammad Tahir Wahid, Munsha’at, 23a-26a. Khafi Khan, I, 684.
257

Nadir Muhammad

The Shah could not possibly wish to lead his army to Qandahar in the middle of
winter, he declared, and he instructed the newly-gathered troops to stay in Lahore
until they were needed. In the meantime he had Shah ‘Abbas's envoy treated with the
utmost contempt, as representing an enemy. Shah Quli Bik was neither allowed to go
to Lahore, nor to see the Emperor.!6° And it was no doubt for his benefit that
Sa‘dallah Khan wrote to the governor of Qandahar, explaining that the Emperor
thought Shah ‘Abbas foolish to have joined forces with ‘Abd al-‘Aziz who ‘had fled
before the Mughal troops’, and more foolish still to have slighted Jan Nathar Khan

and honoured ‘Abd al-‘Aziz's ambassador.!©!
When ‘Abbas II and his army arrived outside Qandahar at the beginning of Dhu
’|-hijja 1058/17 December 1648, Shah Jahan was dismayed. However, he at last took
speedy action. Although this was the worst possible time for his armies to march, he
ordered Sa‘dallah Khan and Aurangzib to set off at once for Qandahar with the
70,000 troops who had been gathered for this purpose. He himself followed them
with more troops in March, but they were all too late, for Qandahar had fallen to
‘Abbas II on 8 Safar 1059/21 February 1649.16
This was a great achievement for the 16-year-old Shah, whose self-confidence
and prestige grew considerably as a result. It is not known whether ‘Abd al-‘Aziz
contributed directly to his victory. He certainly did not march to Qandahar himself, as
he was hoping for an opportunity to seize Balkh while the Emperor and the Shah
were involved in the siege of Qandahar. However, although he does not appear to
have sent troops to Qandahar, it is thought that he helped to persuade Mughal officers
of ‘Uzbeg’ ( Ma wara’ al-nahr) origin to betray the Emperor's trust and to support the
Shah. It can hardly have been a coincidence that one of the ringleaders, whose name
was Qipchaq Khan, had just returned from the khanate when, in the words of
Muhammad Salih, he decided to ‘go off the road of gratitude’. Qipchaq Khan tried to
persuade the governor to surrender. He took part in all the negotiations with the
besieging army, and he eventually accompanied the governor when he went to see the

Shah, immediately after surrendering Qandahar.
13
While all this was taking place Nadir Muhammad had been dealing with a series
of major problems. The siege of Balkh had neither improved his personal position,
nor the economic situation of the province. Some of his amirs held him responsible
for the food shortages, and for the discontent and disorders which ensued. They tried
to replace him with his son, but Nadir Muhammad found out in time. He took swift
action, having Subhan Quli brought to him and put in fetters. The plotters then tried to
intimidate him. Marching into the citadel they ordered Nadir Muhammad to hand over
the province to his son and leave for the Holy Places. When he refused and threatened
to kill Subhan Quli that very night, the plotters were thoroughly disconcerted. They
retired to deliberate, whereupon he had them all arrested and put to death.
A month later he pardoned his son, as it seemed clear that Subhan Quli had not
been involved in the plot. In order to demonstrate his renewed trust in the young man

he even sent him with Kafsh Qalmaq to make a bid for Maimana and the nearby fort

of Za'faran, which were held by ‘Abd al-‘Aziz's forces. ‘Abd al-‘Aziz at once sent
2,000 men to reinforce the garrisons. About eight miles from Maimana they came
160 Muhammad Salih, ‘Amal, III, 66. Khafi Khan, I, 685, says he was not allowed beyond Lahore.

161 Muhammad Salih, ‘Amal, III, 63. Khafi Khan, I, 684-5. Riazul Islam, A Calendar, I, 303.

162 Khafi Khan, I, 686. Burgess dates the fall of the town 12 Safar/25 February. CHI, IV, 205.

163 Muhammad Salih, ‘Amal, III, 76-78. CHI, IV, 205.

258

1641-51

upon Kafsh Qalmaq who had gone ahead on reconnaissance with a small number of
men.

He engaged them in battle but, although he fought bravely, he was soon

overcome and captured. Subhan Quli might have tried to rescue his father's staunch
supporter, but he did nothing of the sort. Fearful for his own safety, he decided
instead to change his allegiance, and he read the khutbah in the name of ‘Abd al‘Aziz. His betrayal sealed Kafsh Qalmaq's fate: he was put to death shortly
afterwards by order of the three amirs in charge - Khishi Lab Chak, Suyanj Bi and

Bik Ughli - and his head was sent to ‘Abd al-‘Aziz.164
Once again Nadir Muhammad had been betrayed by one of his sons. But he did
not despair. He proved his resilience by trying to secure Shah Jahan's support and by
asking for the return of those of his sons who had been taken to India in 1646. In his
situation it was important to establish good relations with the Emperor. In any case he
wanted to thank Shah Jahan for his readiness to help him during the siege of Balkh,
and he thought it essential to dissociate himself from ‘Abd al-‘Aziz and from the
encouragement which his son had given Shah ‘Abbas in relation to Qandahar. Nadir
Nadir Muhammad carefully chose his ambassador for this mission. The man selected,

a certain Khwajah Jan or Khwajah Khan,!© was chosen for two main reasons. First,
he was the son of Uzbeg Khwajah, a successful diplomat who had been sent, first to
Jahangir, and later to Shah Jahan after the abortive Mughal attack on the khanate of
1639. Secondly, Khwajah Jan was related to the influential Juibari shaikhs, and they
had established a good rapport with Shah Jahan ever since the Mughal occupation of

Balkh.16
Khwajah Jan arrived at the Emperor's Court on 14 Dht ’1-hijja/30 December
1648, two weeks after Shah ‘Abbas reached Qandahar. He delivered a letter from the

khan and a gift of horses from himself, and was treated most generously. He was
given a rich robe, a bejewelled dagger, 10,000 rupees and money for his companions
after the first audience, and similar largesse followed the next two audiences. And
when he left on 2 Safar/15 February 1649, he took back a number of gold trays and a

horse with a silver saddle.167
About a month later, still unaware that Qandahar had actually fallen, Shah Jahan
set off for Kabul to supervise Aurangzib's defence of the town.!68 On the way he met
a second envoy from Nadir Muhammad, a mere courier called Faujqar Bik, who
probably delivered a second request for the release of Nadir Muhammad's sons.
Faujqar Bik was dismissed remarkably quickly, only ten days later, but he had seen
the Emperor twice, which was something of a record, and he had been presented with
3,000 rupees and two rich outfits. This augured well for the return of Nadir
Muhammad's sons. The khan accordingly redoubled his efforts to get his sons back
and sent no less than three separate envoys to India during the following three weeks.
They all arrived in Kabul during May 1649 with letters asking for the release of the
Princes. They were the diwanbegi Muhammad Murad Bi, a certain Yadgar Chulaq
164 Muhammad Salih, ‘Amal, III, 95-96. Warith, 71b-72a.
165 This does not appear to have been the same Khwajah Khan who was sent to Jahangir in 1611.

166 |
jhauri, II, 544-5, 608, 611. Warith, 28b, 47b, 67b, 134a-b. Taib Khwajah visited India on
several occasions after 1646.
167 Warith, 51b, 53a, 55b-56a, calls him Khwajah Khan and says he delivered nine horses.
Muhammad Salih, ‘Amal, III, 6, gives the number of horses as twenty. Khafi Khan, I, 687,
calls him Khwajah Jan.
168 Knafi Khan, I, 687. Riazul Islam, A Calendar, I, 317, 323. Sa‘dallah and Aurangzib were still
trying to make their way to Qandahar on 1 Rabi‘I 1059/15 March 1649.

Zoo

Nadir Muhammad
who was sent 50 days later but arrived with him, and the yasawul Arslan, who

delivered a letter and ‘an excellent pie-bald horse’ three days after the arrival of the

first two. 169
The reason for Nadir Muhammad's impatience was simply that the situation was
becoming critical. Some time in March or April 1649 ‘Abd al-‘Aziz and Subhan Quli
had fallen out. According to Muhammad Yisuf Munshi, Subhan Quli had become
disgruntled with his brother's promises and had decided to join his father. Whether
this was the case or not, all contemporary sources agree that “Abd al-‘Aziz sent a
number of amirs, including Subhan Quli's former ataliq, Tardi “Ali Qataghan, to
apprehend his brother. In order to facilitate their task they were told to pretend that
that they had come to help Subhan Quli seize his father and conquer Balkh, but
Subhan Quli was not convinced by their assurances. He invited them to dinner at
Saripul and during the meal he had them all put to death. He then had their heads sent
to his father in token of his devotion and Nadir Muhammad thanked him profusely.
However, he no longer felt able to trust Subhan Quli. Realising that the young man
had probably set his sights on the province of Balkh, he continued to press the
Emperor for the return of his other sons who were sure to be more reliable.
He even sent the Emperor the heads of the amirs recently killed by Subhan Quli
‘in order to demonstrate the sincerity’ of his affection. These heads were delivered to
Shah Jahan in Kabul, where he was supervising Aurangzib's attempt to retake
Qandahar. Nadir Muhammad's envoy, Dist Bik, arrived there on 28 Jumada I/9 June
1649, only three weeks after his immediate predecessor, Arslan Bik. He delivered the
severed heads, was thanked for the gift, given a modest reward and sent back without
further ado. Shah Jahan no doubt appreciated Nadir Muhammad's offering, but there
was no point in keeping the envoy longer and giving him further interviews, together
with the usual presents. In any case he wanted Dist Bik to notify Nadir Muhammad
that one of his. sons had at last agreed to return from India and would soon be on his
way.!70
Shah Jahan had decided to send back Nadir Muhammad's relatives from India, as
requested, some time earlier. However, of the four Princes living in India, only the
youngest, ‘Abd al-Rahmaan, wished to return to the khanate. Neither Khusrau nor
Bahram, nor even Khusrau's son Rustam, was prepared to forego the advantages of
life in India where they were treated with great generosity and where they enjoyed the
milder climate, as well as the more luxurious way of life. That Khusrau did not want

to return, and that Khusrau's son, Rustam should follow his example, was hardly
surprising.!7! Khusrau had never got on with his father and his father had probably
not asked for him. But Nadir Muhammad will have been disappointed that his third
son, Bahram, preferred to remain in India, for he was energetic and determined, as

shown in his disputes with his various ataliqs,!72 and he could have provided his
father with useful support and help. In contrast, Nadir Muhammad's sixth and
youngest son, “Abd al-Rahman, was as yet an unknown quantity. Because of his
youth he had never been appointed to any province by his father and he had not had a
chance to prove himself.
169 Warith, 56b, 67a, 69b-70a. Muhammad Salih, ‘Amal, III, 94.

170 Muhammad Yisuf Munshi, 261b-2a. Warith, 72a-b. Muhammad Salih, ‘Amal III, 94, 96-97.
Hajji Mir, 263a-4a. Saripul is south-west of Balkh.

ie
» Although his brother, Qasim Muhammad, had willingly supported Nadir Muhammad.
2 See above for Bahram's quarrels with Baqi Yuz in Tashkent in 1643 and Daulat Bik in Hisar in

1645.

260

1641-51
He was sent off to the khanate, however, together with the ladies of Nadir

Muhammad's harem, on 24 Jumada II/6 July 1649.!73 They travelled with two of the
khan's ambassadors, Muhammad Murad Bi and Yadgar Chulagq, who had been
magnificently treated by the Emperor during a stay of just over seven weeks and who
were each taking back 5,000 rupees, plus a horse with a silver saddle and a
bejewelled dagger. The Emperor also detailed three high-ranking Mughal officials,
Ghazi Bik, Nad ‘Ali Bik and Rahman Khan, to see the convoy safely to the khanate.
Rich presents were given to each member of the escort, and the party, which must
have been an impressive sight, set off, taking an elephant to Nadir Muhammad,
together with a gift of 200,000 rupees which would enable him to reward Subhan
Quli for ridding him of Tardi ‘Ali and other disloyal amirs. ‘Abd al-Rahman himself
was richly equipped for his return journey. The Emperor presented him with a
bejewelled dagger and sword, two horses from the Imperial stables bearing gold
saddles, 30,000 rupees for his travelling expenses and 20,000 rupees' worth of
jewels, materials, and objects decorated with silver, gold and jewels.!74
Nadir Muhammad was delighted with Shah Jahan's generosity. He hastened to
write and express his gratitude, entrusting his letter to two ambassadors, Nazar
Muhammad and Muhammad Latif, who arrived in Kabul as early as 15 Sha‘ban/24
August. Shortly afterwards he dismissed the Mughal officials who had accompanied
his son's party and they were able to report to the Emperor on 12 Ramadan/19

September 1649.175
Six days earlier Aurangzib had been forced to give up the siege of Qandahar
which he had begun on 24 May. The town had held fast, no doubt because Shah
“Abbas had sent reinforcements to the garrison and because the governor of the town
had received encouraging letters from “Turani’ officials who had written, offering all
manner of help to Iranian pilgrims and traders travelling through the khanate.
Although Aurangzib had ravaged the area around the town and managed to defeat the
Iranian relieving force said to be 14,000 strong, he had proved unable to retake
Qandahar, because he lacked an effective siege train and because, due to the
inefficient way in which the campaign had been prepared, he had run short of
ammunition and supplies. By the end of Sha‘ban Shah Jahan had regretfully decided
to raise the siege. As it was essential for him to dissociate himself from an humiliating
withdrawal he left for Lahore nearly a week before Aurangzib, on 29 Sha’ban/7
September 1649. The Prince followed with his poorly equipped troops and arrived in
Lahore on 15 Dhi ’!-hijja/20 December 1649.
Meanwhile in the khanate Shah Jahan's generosity had helped to bring about a
momentary improvement in Nadir Muhammad's relations with his son and Subhan
Quli took advantage of this in order to send a first embassy to the Emperor. His
ambassador, Shah Suwar, arrived in Lahore in November 1649 in the company of a
certain Mulla Fadl Allah from Balkh and presented Shah Jahan with a number of

horses and camels. Two weeks later Atesh Qalmaq,!7® brother of Nadir
Muhammad's former supporter Kafsh Qalmaq, came over on the khan's behalf with a
good size suite, which included his own brother and his son. Atesh Qalmag delivered
Salih, ‘Amal, III, 98, places their departure some time after the
beginning of Rajab (11 July). Khafi Khan, gives no date. for their departure.

173 Warith, 74b. Muhammad

174 warith, 73a-b, 74b-5a. Muhammad Salih, ‘Amal, III, 97-8. Kbafi Khan, I, 694-5. Hajji Mir,
261a, says that only Nadir Muhammad 's wives were sent back.

175 Warith, 77a, 87b.
176 Also known as Muhammad Sa‘id.

261

Nadir Muhammad

a ‘report’ from ‘Abd al-Rahmaan in which the Prince probably mentioned his journey
and his reception in Balkh. He also brought horses for the Emperor, together with a
second letter of thanks which, according to Shah Jahan's eventual answer, appears to
have included a request for further material help. However, as Nadir Muhammad's
letter has not survived, it is not clear whether the help was needed for repairing the
severely damaged economy of Balkh or for equipping his soldiers in anticipation of
the next round against ‘Abd al-‘Aziz.
Shah Jahan treated the two envoys generously, although he dismissed Shah
Suwar in December and kept Atesh Qalmagq four times longer, i.e. until April. This
gave him the opportunity of showing greater regard for Nadir Muhammad's envoy by
inviting him several more times to attend Court. However, as he knew that the khan
would be anxious to hear his ambassador's report, he took the unusual step of
sending Atesh Qalmaq back two months before his own ambassador was ready to
leave for Balkh, although the two envoys would normally have travelled together. By
the time Atesh Qalmaq was dismissed in April 1650 he had been given a total of
22,000 rupees, together with two rich outfits, and a sword, a shield and a dagger belt
encrusted with gold.!77
Such generosity towards his envoy should have satisfied Nadir Muhammad that
he himself would soon obtain a sizeable amount from Shah Jahan in answer to his
request for help. But the khan was impatient and his situation was deteriorating
rapidly. Rather than wait for the envoy whose despatch Atesh Qalmaq assured him
was imminent, he sent two more ambassadors to the Emperor to hasten his response
and to ensure that this response was satisfactory. The first mission was led once again
by Atesh Qalmagq, who arrived at the Mughal Court on 1 June 1650, even before the
Emperor's ambassador had set off for the khanate. He delivered a letter said to have
been ‘full of thanks and obedience’, and he was followed, on 1 July, by Khushika Bi
Kara’ it who brought a further appeal for help. Although the Emperor had already sent
the required help to Balkh with his ambassador, Khwajah Qasim, who had left for
Balkh two weeks earlier, he kept Khushika Bi Kara’it an appropriate length of time at
Court and received him twice before dismissing him on 24 July.
Khwajah Qasim, who was sent on his way on 18 Jumada II/18 June 1650, was
carefully chosen for his mission. He was not only likely to please the khan, but also
capable of finding out every detail of the situation in Balkh. He was originally from
the khanate and had even held a high administrative position in Balkh before the
Mughal invasion, having lived in India only since December 1646. He brought over a
gift of 10,000 rupees for ‘Abd al-Rahman and a long letter for Nadir Muhammad
from Shah Jahan. The Emperor began by referring to Nadir Muhammad's request for
help. He said that he was prepared to help him then and to keep on helping him in the
future because of their similar (religious?) views and because they were allies. He
was accordingly sending him jewels and bejewelled objects to the value of 100,000
rupees as a gift (which need not be returned). Turning next to Shah ‘Abbas's capture
of Qandahar, he wrote angrily about it, but said that the subsequent Mughal

expedition to the town had caused the Shah to flee back to Herat.!78 He added that his
armies had since raised the siege because of the winter and that they would resume it

177 Muhammad Salih, ‘Amal, III, 103, 105, 110, 111. Warith, 88b, 89b, 94b, 95b, 98b. Anon.,
Padshanama, 433b.

178Muhammad Tahir Wahid, ‘Abbdsndma, 137 n. Shah ‘Abbas had returned to Khurasan in
September. Muhammad Salih, ‘Amal, III, 111, calls Nadir Muhammad's envoy Khastakah Bi.

262

1641-51

“when the weather improved’ (i.e.presumably in July or August). Finally he pointed
out that he had dismissed Atesh Qalmaq two months earlier than intended in order to
please the khan, and he asked for Khwajah Qasim to be dismissed as soon as
possible.179
Nadir Muhammad must have been pleased with the Emperor's letter and
generosity. But, although, shortly after Khwajah Qasim's arrival, he sent Muhammad
Latif on a second mission to Shah Jahan with a gift of Nashpati pears and no doubt a
message of gratitude, he did not hurry to dismiss the khwajah. Instead he kept him in
Balkh for approximately nine months. The reason for this may have been that the
situation in the province deteriorated still further during Khwajah Qasim's stay,

causing Nadir Muhammad to fear for the ambassador's safety.!80
After Khwajah Qasim's departure Nadir Muhammad sent no further embassies to
India. He was soon fully occupied with trying to defend himself and the town of
Balkh against a new onslaught by his sons. Although no precise dates are known, the
sequence of events appears to be as follows. ‘Abd al-‘Aziz began by sending his
brother Qutluq Muhammad to govern Badakhshan. On his way he was told to seize
Balkh and to punish Subhan Quli for killing his amirs. Subhan Quli, who was still
apparently at Saripul, appealed to Nadir Muhammad for help, alleging that he had
killed the amirs for his father's sake. He also offered to fight ‘Abd al-‘Aziz on his
behalf. Nadir Muhammad let Subhan Quli have an army in order to halt Qutluq
Muhammad's progress, on condition that he should endeavour to take him prisoner
and not put him to death, but Subhan Quli took no notice of his father's proviso.
After defeating Qutluq Muhammad he had him put to death.!8! This angered and
upset Nadir Muhammad, who responded by concentrating his affection on ‘Abd alRahman. As a result Subhan Quli became jealous of his younger brother. He
suspected his father of wanting to make ‘Abd al-Rahman his heir and decided to have
his revenge. He formed an alliance with the Qazaqs to whom he gave ‘several places’

in the province of Balkh.!82 He also acquired a large number of Qalmaq supporters
and waited for a chance to attack.
His chance came when Nadir Muhammad appointed ‘Abd al-Rahman governor of
Ghuri and sent him off to take up his post with a strong escort consisting of the
greater part of his army. Balkh being virtually unprotected Subhan Quli attacked and,
as he had anticipated, his father recalled ‘Abd al-Rahman and his troops. Qalmaq
troops loyal to Subhan Quli then waylaid them and took ‘Abd al-Rahman prisoner,
much to Subhan Quli's delight. This was a severe setback for Nadir Muhammad, but
worse was still to come.
Not only did the siege of Balkh continue, but Subhan Quli systematically
destroyed everything outside the town, thus causing much hardship to the inhabitants.
And when ‘Abd al-Rahman managed to escape from his captors in March, he decided
to return to India rather than take any further risks by helping his father. He arrived at
the Emperor's Court on 16 Rabi‘I 1061/8 April 1651 to a very warm welcome, 18?

179 warith, 96a-98b, 99a. Anon., Padshandma, 433b-5a. Riazul Islam, A Calendar, II, 260.
180 Warith, 107a, 111b. Khwajah Qasim was back to India in April 1651.
181 Hajji Mir, 263b-4a. Muhammad Yusuf Munshi, 260b- 1b, places Qutlug Muhammad's defection
to ‘Abd al-‘Aziz, his campaign against Subhan Quli and his death shortly after the Mughal
retreat. He adds that Qasim Muhammad was won over to ‘Abd al-‘Aziz after Qutluq Muhmmad's

death.
182 Thid., 264a-b.
183 Khafi Khan, I, 703-4. Muhammad Salih, ‘Amal, III, 123. Warith, 112b-3a, places ‘Abd al-

263

Nadir Muhammad

and appears to have forgotten all about his father. Shah Jahan did not try to save
Nadir Muhammad. He went to Kashmir, as planned, and by the time he returned
Nadir Muhammad had abdicated.
Balkh had been under siege for two months when the people of the town heard
that Nadir Muhammad's last hope, ‘Abd al-Rahman, had left for India. They were
bitterly disappointed, as was the khan. The amirs and khwajahs took a more
pragmatic line and decided to:invite Subhan Quli into the town. Nadir Muhammad
held out for a few days in the citadel, then, realising the hopelessness of his situation,
and reluctant to inflict more suffering on his people, he abdicated. He left for the
Hijaz on 16 Jumada I 1061/7 May 1651, after asking to see Subhan Quli, who
apparently refused him a meeting.
Once again Nadir Muhammad travelled to Khurasan and Iran. He was well
received by the various governors on his way, and Shah ‘Abbas sent him presents
and money with a certain Shah Nazar Bik, whom he appointed his mehmandar. But
the khan was no longer able to enjoy the warmth of the Shah's generosity. He was
now a broken, ailing man. In a letter which reached the Shah straight after he had
despatched Shah Nazar Bik, Nadir Muhammad wrote that he was seriously ill, with
no hope of recovery. He asked for his body to be taken to Medina after his death and
for his suite to be treated kindly. He had not exaggerated his condition: on the last day
of Jumada II/19 June, a few days after writing to the Shah and just over a month after

leaving Balkh, he died at Semnan.!®4
Nadir Muhammad had been generous with his sons and aggressive towards his

neighbours. Yet when he died, at the age of 59,185 he was at loggerheads with his
sons and on good terms with the rulers of India and Iran. He greatly enriched the
province of Balkh when he ruled it under the aegis of his brother, but he left it
impoverished as a result of the Mughal invasion and the ensuing ‘war of attrition’
conducted by his over-ambitious sons. After his death ‘Abd al-‘Aziz thought it would
be easy to reunite the khanate at last, but he was plagued throughout his reign by
Subhan Quli's hostility and he was never able to exercise full control over the
province of Balkh.

184 Hajji Mir, 264b. Muhammad Yusuf Munshi, 265a-6a. Muhammad Tahir Wahid, ‘Abbadsnama,

146. Warith, 120b. Muhammad Salih, III, 131.

185 Mahmid b. Wali (Ethé), 162a, says he was born in 1000/between 19 October 1591 and 7
October 1592. Hajji Mir, 265a, 139b, says he was 59, although he gives his date of birth
as
1002 (between 16 September 1593 and 5 September 1594), which would make him between
56
and 57. Qipchaq Khan, 275b, makes him nearly 70.

264

8
‘Abd al-‘Aziz alone at the helm
(1651-1681)

When they heard of his death Nadir Muhammad's sons suddenly remembered their
filial duty. They went into mourning and distributed alms in his memory. ‘Abd al‘Aziz even wept for the father whom he had fought for so many years. Shah ‘Abbas
also acted irreproachably on this occasion. He had food distributed in the khan's
name, he treated Nadir Muhammad's escort generously, and he even allowed them to
take back to the khanate the whole of the khan's belongings, although they were

apparently worth about 100,000 taman, or 13.33 million tanga.!
Shah Nazar Bik accompanied them to the khanate. He took with him a letter of
condolence, in which the Shah began by expressing affection for ‘Abd al-‘Aziz and
admiration for the late khan's known punctiliousness in religious observance. He then
turned to Nadir Muhammad's last wish and asked ‘Abd al-‘Aziz to send a man well-

versed in languages and eloquent in Arabic, together with some of his father's
relatives, so that they might take the body to its resting-place.2
Shah Jahan similarly expressed regret at the news of Nadir Muhammad's death.
He sent the customary gifts of condolence to Khusrau, Bahram and ‘Abd al-Rahman,
and it was probably at his suggestion that Dara Shikuh despatched Mir ‘Aziz with a
letter of condolence and rich gifts for ‘Abd al-“Aziz. This was a first step towards
establishing relations with the ruler of Bukhara, whom Shah Jahan, as Nadir
Muhammad's self-styled champion, had so far ignored. He would now take ‘Abd al‘Aziz into account and attempt to win him over in order to put an end to the dangerous
Irano-Bukharan alliance which was threatening India.3
Shah Jahan's messages of condolence and regret at the khan's passing were no
more than a concession to the laws of propriety and etiquette. In fact his feeling of
resentment had endured notwithstanding the help that he had recently given to Nadir
Muhammad. This comes out clearly from the letter which he wrote to Mehmet IV in
Dhi ’1-hijja (15 November to 14 December 1651) shortly after he had been told that
the khan had died. Shah Jahan had been stung to the quick by the censuring tone of
the Ottoman missive of April 1649 which was delivered to him by Muhi al-Din in

1 Muhammad Tahir Wahid, ‘Abbdsnama, 146. Muhammad Tahir Wahid, ‘Abbasnama, 146. See
Warith (20b-21a), Gladwin, 62-63, and Hodivala, 193-4, for the comparative values of the tuman
and the khani under Shah Jahan, which they give as 1 to 119, 1 to 133 and 1 to 142.8. See also

Burton A., Bukharan trade, 87, 87n.
2 Muhammad Tahir Wahid, ‘Abbdsndma, 146-9. Hajji Mir, 265b-7a. Muhammad Yusuf Munshi,
266a.
3 Muhammad Salih, ‘Amal, III, 131. Warith, 120b. Hajji Mir, 267a.

‘Abd al- ‘Aziz

about August or September 1651,4 and he answered it sharply. He began by saying
that the Sultan was obviously ill-informed, then he proceeded to give a slanted, and
partly incorrect, summary of events in the khanate since 1641. Nadir Muhammad had
ruled Balkh until his brother's ‘death’. When he became ruler of Ma wara’ al-nahr,
his ‘improper conduct, odious habits and even more detestable actions’ had caused
his subjects’ hearts to ‘turn from him’. Rebellion followed, and when the Alman,
who ‘lacked religion and reliability’, began to attack, raid and plunder Balkh and
Badakhshan, Nadir Muhammad appealed to the Emperor for help. Shah Jahan
decided to intervene in the name of religion and to ensure that no more sayyids were
killed. At this stage, owing to a misunderstanding, Nadir Muhammad left for Iran.
The Mughals therefore pacified the area and administered it until Nadir Muhammad
came back. The country was then returned to him (the implication being that it had
been returned at once), but the khan had only managed to keep it for three and a half
years, after which he was driven out by Subhan Quli on ‘Abd al-‘Aziz's orders.> So
much for Shah Jahan's letter to the Sultan.
Meanwhile Shah Jahan's indirect overtures through Mir ‘Aziz had done nothing to
alter ‘Abd al-‘Aziz's attitude towards India. The new ruler of the khanate had
remained allied to Shah ‘Abbas who kept on urging him to attack Kabul in order to
deter the Mughals from attempting the reconquest of Qandahar.® On 5 June 1652,
however, an embarrassing incident took place which could have severely affected the
Bukharo-Iranian alliance. Marauders from the khanate attacked a village near
Maruchagq, an area which had been controlled by Iran since 1647, and seized large
quantities of cattle. Not surprisingly this caused an uproar in Khurasan, but the
alliance remained unaffected for two reasons. On the one hand the amir who seems to
have been responsible for this and for several other attacks on Khurasan, a relative of
Yalangtish Bi's called Fulad Sarai, was sent to Iran to be kept under house arrest. On
the other hand, and much to “Abbas II's satisfaction, shortly before the Maruchaq
incident ‘Abd al-‘Aziz had sent a force of 10,000 men towards Kabul, among whom

there were 8,000 ‘Uzbegs and Alman’ from Bukhara, and 2,000 men from Balkh. 7
They were despatched in May 1652, shortly after it was known in the khanate that
Aurangzib and Sa‘dallah Khan had begun their second siege of Qandahar, the
progress of which Shah Jahan was following eagerly from Kabul. In his account the
Mughal historian Muhammad Salih dismisses the troops from the khanate as mere
marauders whose aim was to plunder the area of Ghazni, but it seems more likely that
they intended to intercept the convoy of 2,000 men which was taking one and a half
million rupees to Qandahar. It is not known whether they inflicted any casualties on
the convoy or whether they managed to relieve it of any of its supplies but, although
Muhammad Salih insists that they fled on hearing the convoy's drums, leaving behind
9,000 men either killed or taken prisoner, it seems clear that they achieved what they
4 Warith, 120b. Khafi Khan, I, 707, appears to place the Ottoman ambassador's arrival at the
Emperor's Court shortly after that of Nadir Muhammad's son ‘Abd al-Rahman which took place in
Ramadan (18 Augut-17 September).
5 Warith, 120b-4b. Bhagchand, 138b-48b. This letter was taken to Istanbul by Hajji Sayyid Ahmad
Sa‘id.
6 See Muhammad Tahir Wahid, Munsha’at, pass., for Shah ‘Abbas's letters to the khan. These
letters are unfortunately undated and totally vague, so that they cannot be assigned to any particular
year.
7 Qabil Khan, Or 177, 19b-20a. Muhammad Tahir Wahid, ‘Abbdsndma, 161 does not give the date

of Fulad's arrival in Iran, but says that he was released in 1653, by which time it can be assumed
that he had spent a number of months, or even a year, in Iran.

266

1651-81

had set out to do, which was to relieve Qandahar. As a result of their campaign the
Emperor first sent an amir to pacify the mountain area near Ghazni, then he recalled
Jan Bik to Kabul with his undelivered consignment and finally, believing himself to
be in danger, he requested Aurangzib to raise the siege of Qandahar and make for
Kabul. By the time the Emperor realised that the danger was over and rescinded his
orders, it was too late for the Prince to resume the siege. Clearly angered by his
father's hasty decision, Aurangzib permitted himself to point out that half the army
then under Shah Jahan's orders should have been able to cope with what he believed
to be a force of only 12,000 ‘Almanian’.8 The Iranian ambassador who was in Kabul
in June is sure to have told Shah ‘Abbas of the results of the ‘Uzbeg’ move and no
doubt the Shah was delighted to hear that the siege of Qandahar had been raised
thanks to them.
The incident at Ghazni did not interrupt the steady stream of envoys who brought
gifts to the Emperor and traded in India on behalf of the Juibari and other khwajahs of
Ma wara’ al-nahr. They were always well received at the Mughal Court, for they
provided useful information on events in the khanate. And both ‘Abd al-‘Aziz and
Shah Jahan must have approved of the link formed between ‘Abd al-Ghaffar and
Aurangzib, on which they themselves hoped to build in the future. It is interesting to
note in this connection that an envoy from Khwajah ‘Abd al-Ghaffar delivered
falcons, horses and camels for the Emperor less than a week after the Ghazni
incident, and that the khwajah later wrote to enquire from Aurangzib about the latest
developments in Qandahar. In his reply Aurangzib declined to answer this question,
saying that the khwajah was sure to have heard all the details through travellers, but
he announced that he would soon take up a post in the Deccan, a clear indication that
the siege was over for the time being. Meanwhile expatriates from the khanate arrived
in India in growing numbers, hoping to benefit from the Emperor's generosity. And
those of Nadir Muhammad's sons who were living in India were content to remain

there. They made no effort to force ‘Abd al-“Aziz off his throne, nor were they
encouraged by Shah Jahan to put themselves forward as candidates for the Bukharan

throne.?
The khanate's relations with Muscovy were non-existent in the early part of “Abd
al-‘Aziz's reign. Indeed they had lapsed ever since Gribov's mission to the khanate.
Until 1651 ‘Abd al-‘Aziz had been more concerned with trying to secure control over
the whole of Ma wara’ al-nahr and with ousting his father from Balkh. After that date
and for several years he was to concentrate instead on establishing his central role in
the Irano-Indian conflict over Qandahar, and on defending himself from the attacks of
Subhan Quli and the Khwarazmian ruler, Abi ’1-Ghazi. For his part Tsar Aleksei
thought the khanate too unsettled for him to send envoys or traders to the area. In any
case he was still trying, in 1654, to secure compensation for a party of Muscovite
traders who had been robbed by Abi ’1-Ghazi on their way to Bukhara in 1646, and
he viewed ‘Abd al-‘Aziz with the greatest suspicion. Thus, he was afraid of declaring
war on Poland, as the Cossacks were urging him to do, in case ‘Abd al-‘Aziz might

take advantage of his absence to launch an attack on Muscovy. He also believed that
the khan was anxious to assert his sovereignty over the Noghays of the Astrakhan

8 Muhammad Salih, ‘Amai, III, 146-7. Qabil Khan, BL Or 177, 24a-b.
9 Warith, 134a, 135a, 143a, 143b. Qabil Khan, Lahore edition, 615-6. CHI, IV, 207. Khafi Khan, I,

716, 710. ‘Abd al-Rahman, however, displeased the Emperor with his behaviour and was
consequently exiled to Bengal in the spring of 1652.

267

‘Abd al-‘Aziz
region, as Nadir Muhammad had tried to do in 1643. That might be why in 1651 he
made the Noghays promise not to write to Bukhara and other Muslim powers, and
also that they would take his side in any conflict with them. Similarly, he tried to
ensure that the Muslim ruler of the province of Kasimov had no contact with Bukhara

and other Muslims.!°
In 1653 the Irano-Mughal conflict over Qandahar was resumed. This time the
Mughal army was led by Aurangzib's older brother, Dara Shikth, who wanted to
prove that he could succeed where Aurangzib had failed. After careful and lengthy
preparations he set off from Multan in February. At this stage Shah “Abbas appears to
have written to ‘Abd al-‘Aziz asking him to attack Kabul once more, but although
three envoys from Bukhara arrived in Isfahan in that year, and two of the Shah's
envoys were returned, one of whom, Shah Nazar Bik, had been in the khanate since
1651, nothing was done. ‘Abd al-‘Aziz's envoys only brought a general message of
friendship, together with a request for the release of Fulad Sarai, whom the khan had
decided to re-admit to the khanate provided that he first performed the pilgrimage to
Mecca. Shah ‘Abbas readily agreed to this, but still ‘Abd al-*‘Aziz took no action
against Kabul. He was concerned about developments in Balkh, where Subhan Quli
was fretting under his tutelage and trying to rulesindependently. When ‘Abd al-‘Aziz
insisted on exerting his authority the situation became strained, and Subhan Quli
bribed the Qazags to attack his brother. The khan then marched against the Qazaqs
and defeated them, a success which he hastened to report to the Shah. By this time it
was autumn 1653 and Dara Shikith had raised the siege of Qandahar in October,
having failed to make any progress, although he had taken the fort of Bist. However,
he was likely to return to the attack after the winter. Shah ‘Abbas therefore thought it
essential to remind ‘Abd al-‘Aziz, when he wrote to congratulate him on his success
against ‘the people of error’, that he had promised to attack Kabul in the near

future.!!
At this stage “Abd al-‘Aziz was still on such good terms with the ruler of
Khwarazm that Abu ’1-Ghazi took the trouble to warn him that the Torgout Qalmaq,
after ravaging Hazarasp, appeared to be making for Bukhara.!2 ‘Abd al-‘Aziz's
relations with Kashghariya, on the other hand, were unfriendly and it might have
been in that year that ‘Abdallah of Kashghariya undertook a first, and entirely
successful, siege of Andijan. He appointed a governor and returned to Kashghariya,
but the town ousted his appointee after he left, so he organised a second expedition to
Andijan the following year. On this occasion he appears to have met with such great
resistance that he had to retire, leaving ‘Andijanis, Tajiks and Uzbegs’ installed in the

citadel. And he carried out no further attacks on the khanate.!3
10 Materialy, 200-10, 328. A.J., IV, 50. S.G.G.D., Ill, 468-9. See also Burton, Bukharans

trade, 598 n.42.

1] Khafi Khan, I, 717-27. Dara Shikih's retreat from Qandahar began on 23 September 1653. CHI,
IV, 206. Muhammad Tahir Wahid, ‘Abbadsnama, 152, 152n., 161. Eodem, Munsha’at, 37b-8b.
Qipchagq Khan, 276a. Muhammad Jahangir Khan, 213. Although ‘Abd al-‘Aziz did not attack
Kabul, as suggested, he is said here to have sent his brother Qasim Muhammad to the outskirts of
Qandahar with an army. Their timely arrival ought to have cheered the defenders and impeded the
activities of the besieging Mughal army, but the Mughal Prince apparently persuaded Qasim
Muhammad to accept a large sum of money and return to the khanate.
12 Abi ’1-Ghazi, tr. 349, text 326. In fact the Torgout changed their minds and marched towards
Khiva, only to flee when Abi *1-Ghazi set off against them with an army. They later apologised
to him and promised not to raid Khwarazm again.

13 Shah Mahmid, 72b.

268

1651-81

Meanwhile, although official Bukharo-Muscovite relations had lapsed, the
usefulness of Bukharan expatriates living in Siberia had been fully recognised by the
Muscovite authorities. In 1645 their trading activities throughout Muscovy had
received full official backing, and in July 1653 the Tobol'sk resident Seitkul (Sayyid
Quli) Ablin, who had visited China previously, was entrusted with a major mission.
Together with the Tatar official Petr Yaryzhkin, he was sent to announce in Beijing
the imminent arrival of the very first ambassador from Muscovy, Fedor Baikov. They
spent several months’en route in the encampment of the Khoshout Qalmaq Ablai,
which they only left in the spring of 1654. They were very well treated in Beijing.
Not only were they allowed to sell all their goods, but Emperor K'ang Tsi gave them
presents for the Tsar which were at least eight times as valuable as the ones from Tsar
Aleksei.!4 Their gifts, as well as their behaviour, seem to have particularly pleased
the Emperor, for he gave them a letter addressed to ‘the White Tsar’ and graciously
invited them to return yearly with a tribute.
In contrast, Baikov, who set off after them in early July 1654, fared very badly.
This was partly because he refused to observe the Chinese rules of etiquette and
would neither hand over the Tsar's letter and gifts to the Emperor's officials, nor
perform the kowtow, and partly because the Emperor resented recent Muscovite
attacks on the Chinese settlements near the Amur river. In view of his failure Baikov
was not sent again to China. Neither was Yaryzhkin, for the Tsar was angry to hear
that he had performed the kowtow in Beijing, and pretended to be a fully-fledged
ambassador. He had also failed to wait for Baikov in Ablai's camp, as agreed.
Ablin's behaviour, on the other hand, was thought unimpeachable, and he was
despatched twice more to Beijing.!5
But to return to the khanate, little is known about events there in 1654 except for
the fact that “Abd al-‘Aziz undertook another victorious campaign against some
unspecified Qalmaq, and that he exchanged ambassadors with Shah Jahan.!6 When
‘Abd al-‘Aziz finally sent back Dara Shikth's envoy Mir ‘Aziz, Shah Jahan had
responded at once, hoping that good relations with the khanate would rob Shah
‘Abbas of Bukharan support during the next Mughal campaign to recover Qandahar.
Dismissing to the khanate an envoy from Nadir Muhammad, Atesh Qalmaq, whom he
had kept in India since June 1650, he also sent off his first ambassador to ‘Abd al‘Aziz. This was Koda Bik and perhaps he was the ambassador whom ‘Abd al-‘Aziz
subsequently mentioned with pride in a letter to Shah “Abbas. But Shah ‘Abbas, who
was displeased by the Emperor's obvious attempt to win over his ally, answered
tartly that the arrival of such an ambassador added not a jot to ‘Abd al-‘Aziz's prestige
in his eyes. No doubt the Shah would have been concerned to know that within a
week of Atesh Qalmaq's dismissal two envoys from the khanate had already reached
the Emperor's Court. One was ‘Abd al-‘Aziz's first envoy to Shah Jahan, Yusuf
Khwajah Haidari, who brought a modest offering of nine horses and ten camels, and
was rewarded with a robe and 10,000 rupees. The other was Muhammad Yar Sarai,
14 Russko-kitaiskie otnosheniya, 1, 249-50. The Tsar's presents to the Emperor were only worth
120 roubles, but even before the silver dishes had been assessed the gifts received in return were

valued in excess of 900 roubles.
15 Demidova, Pervye diplomaty, 88-95. Russko-kitaiskie otnosheniya, 1, 146-7, 214-8, 249-50,

Sey
16 Riazul Islam, A Calendar, II, 268. No precise date is given for the campaign, but it is mentioned
in a letter to ‘Abd al-‘Aziz from the Shah as having preceded the arrival of a Mughal embassy to
the khanate which was probably the one of October 1654.

269

‘Abd al-‘Aziz

who delivered a pedigree horse and five camels from ‘Abd al-‘Aziz's ataliq.17
Despite this good start to Bukharo-Mughal relations, there were no further
exchanges between ‘Abd al-‘Aziz and Shah Jahan for some years. Each side was
satisfied that the other did not mean to attack, and both rulers were fully occupied
with internal problems. In the case of ‘Abd al-‘Aziz his relations with his brother
deteriorated to such an extent that the following year Subhan Quli again invited the
Qazagqs to attack the khanate, and sent a similar invitation to Abu ’1-Ghazi. It is not
known whether the new Qazaq chief, Tyavka/Tauka, son of Jahangir, took up his
invitation,!8 but Aba ’l-Ghazi, whose niece was married to Subhan Quli,!? was only
too pleased to accept. He did so for a variety of reasons, of which family solidarity
was not as important as Aba ’1-Ghazi would lead us to believe. Khwarazm was still
suffering from the loss of the Muscovite trade, which had followed the arrest and

robbery of Muscovite merchants travelling to Bukhara in 1646. He must have been
particularly incensed when his explanation, that he had detained the merchants for
their own good, was countered on 21 April 1654 by a-demand for large quantities of
Bukharan goods to the value of the items taken. The fact that this was a sine qua non
condition for the resumption of relations can only have increased Abu ’1-Ghazi's
resentment of the neighbouring khanate.2°
:
Abi ’1-Ghazi carried out two devastating raids on the khanate in 1655. In the first
he sent an amir to Qarakil, while he himself laid waste some 30 to 40 villages outside
Bukhara. In the second he took prisoners and booty, then set fire to Qarakul after
defeating a force of 5,000 men. ‘Abd al-‘Aziz, who was hunting at Qarshi when the
second raid took place, was furious. He decided to discipline Subhan Quli for
instigating these raids. A large army under his nephew, Qasim Muhammad, was sent
to besiege Balkh, but forty days later, when little progress had been made, Qasim

Muhammad agreed to call a truce.2! Subhan Quli gave him the towns and provinces
of Hisar, Qubadiyan and Khulm and peace reigned between them for some years.
In 1656 Abu ’1-Ghazi attacked the khanate again. This time he sacked Chahar Jay,
and it was probably in the autumn of the same year that his ally, Subhan Quli,
attacked Khurasan. Shah ‘Abbas wrote a strong letter to “Abd al-‘Aziz asking him to
restrain his brother. ‘Abd al-‘Aziz countered by asking the Shah to assist in toppling
Abi ’1-Ghazi. In a letter delivered by the chihra aqasi ‘Aud and paraphrased by
Muhammad Tahir Wahid, “Abd al-‘Aziz suggested that the Shah should appoint to
Astarabad a certain Khwarazmian Prince who was living in Iran. This Prince would
then take over as ruler of the Turkmen of Astarabad and the Balkhan region, and with
their support (and that of the ruler of Bukhara, no doubt) he would ‘tear up’ Abia ’1Ghazi's control over Khwarazm. In order to make a greater impact on the Shah, ‘Abd
al-‘Aziz mentioned the damage that Abu ’1-Ghazi's raids were causing to the Irano-

17 Warith, 192b-3b.
18 Qipchaq Khan, 276a. Kalmytskie istoriko-literaturnye pamayatniki, 82. In a Mongol chronicle
Hebe here in translation Jahangir is said to have been killed by the Khoshout Galdan in

652.

19 Aba ’1-Ghazi, tr. 351, text 327-8. She was the daughter of Sharif Muhammad. Muhammad Tahir
Wahid, ‘Abbasnama, 209, says Abi ’1-Ghazi's own daughter had married Subhan Quli.
20 Materialy, 206-7, 209.
21 Aba ’1-Ghazi, tr. 351-2, text 328-9. Muhammad Tahir Wahid, ‘Abbdsnama, 209, 257, places

both Abi *1-Ghazi's attack and Qasim's expedition a year later. He also says that the Alman in
Qasim Muhammad's army took a dislike to him. They went over to his uncle at a time when
victory was within Qasim Muhammad's grasp and their desertion forced him to retire to Qarshi.

Hajji Mir, 269a.

270

1651-81

Bukharan trade. He also stressed that he had recently rejected an offer of friendship
from Shah Jahan in order to remain true to the Iranian alliance.
“Abbas II was not impressed by these arguments. He made this clear in a lengthy
answer in which he replied to each of ‘Abd al-‘Aziz's arguments in turn. He declined
to act against Abu ’1-Ghazi, because this Prince had shown nothing but loyalty and
devotion to the rulers of Iran since his return to Khwarazm. Nevertheless (in order to
please ‘Abd al-“Aziz) he had written to Khiva to ‘forbid’ further raids. He felt sure
that Abi ’1-Ghazi would heed his instructions and would not step out of line in the
future. Turning next to the subject of trade, Shah ‘Abbas said that Bukharan traders
must not be afraid of travelling to Iran, for the Turkmen (of the Murghab area) had

been taught not to molest them. With regard to the allegation that ‘Abd al-‘Aziz had
rejected Shah Jahan's overtures for his sake, he claimed to have made an even greater
sacrifice in the cause of friendship. He had organised the expedition to Qandahar in
order to avenge “Abd al-‘Aziz's father, as he was anxious to punish the Mughals for
the damage which they had inflicted on Nadir Muhammad by ‘tearing up’ his
kingdom and the territories over which he held sway. He warned ‘Abd al-‘Aziz not to
trust the Emperor for Shah Jahan was only approaching him (in desperation) because
he had lost all hope of retaking Qandahar. The letter ended with an announcement that
the goods of a former Bukharan national who had died in Iran were being sent

back,22 but this friendly gesture did little to satisfy ‘Abd al-‘Aziz. He was so
disappointed by the Shah's letter that he at once sent an ambassador to Shah Jahan,
presumably to ask for support against Subhan Quli and Abu ’1-Ghazi. Unfortunately
his ambassador was waylaid and robbed in Balkh, and it seems that he gave up his
mission as a result.
Some months later, Qasim Muhammad attacked Iranian-held Maruchagq. This was
done at the suggestion and with the support of a certain Husam Khan who had
recently arrived from Khurasan where he and his tribe had found refuge during the
Mughal invasion of Balkh. For ‘Abd al-‘Aziz the incident was doubly embarrassing,
because those responsible for it were a brother with whom he was on good terms and
the members of a tribe, the Jamshidi, whose return from Iran to the khanate he and
his father had asked for repeatedly. Luckily, however, it seems that little damage was
done, for there is no record of any protest by “Abbas II, nor do relations between the

two countries appear to have suffered.23
Meanwhile, although Subhan Quli had done his best to disrupt “Abd al-‘Aziz's
relations with India in 1656, he himself sent an ambassador to Shah Jahan early the
following year. Biksi Bi Durman arrived at the Mughal Court on 11 Jumada 1/25
February 1657 with a large number of camels and horses, and three types of huntingbirds for the Emperor. As the Emperor was away and the season was coming to an
end, the Master of the Hunt, Mir Kalan, who was in charge of the 15 birds, took

them over hurriedly for Shah Jahan to test. And Subhan Quli's timely gifts were duly
appreciated. The Master of the Hunt was adequately rewarded and the ambassador
was sent back some six weeks later, on 8 April 1657, with valuable coins, the usual
robe, a bejewelled dagger belt, 25,000 rupees and a horn with a golden handle.”
22 Aba ’1-Ghazi, tr. 352, text 329. Muhammad Tahir Wahid, ‘Abbdsndma, 215, 209-11. Eodem,
Munsha’at, 36b-37b, 28a-30b.
23 Muhammad Yasuf Walih, 260a. Muhammad Tahir Wahid, Munsha’at, 16b-17b.
24 Muhammad Salih, ‘Amal, III, 244-5. Warith, 255a. It is not known when the Master of the Hunt
was dismissed.

orl

‘Abd al- ‘Aziz

That same year Abi ’1-Ghazi carried out two further attacks on the khanate, and if
we are to believe his son Anusha, it seems that ‘Abd al-‘Aziz's attempts at punishing
him were highly ineffectual. In the first campaign Abi ’1-Ghazi ravaged the area of
Qarakil and took much booty back to Khiva, together with captives whom he
probably sold later as slaves. In the second expedition, during which he went as far
as Karmina, there were some very dramatic moments which are recounted rather
differently by Anusha and by the Ashtarkhanid historian, Hajji Mir.
According to Anusha, after a successful attack on Karmina his father set off for
Khwarazm. The following day he became separated from the greater part of his
troops because they set off early in the morning with their booty of cattle, horses and
captives, while he was still sleeping by the banks of a river. Abi ’1-Ghazi was left

with less than 100 men, and ‘Abd al-‘Aziz, who had been told of his circumstances
by a traitor, hurried towards him with some 40,000 to 50,000 men. When Abo ’1Ghazi set off to join his army he found his path blocked by a force of 1,000 heavily
armed men who constituted ‘Abd al-‘Aziz's vanguard.He despatched a messenger to
ask for reinforcements, then dismounted and began to fight, sending small groups of
men in turn to the attack. After seven such attacks had taken place “Abd al-‘Aziz
arrived on the scene with his enormous army.-Although some reinforcements had
joined him, Abi ’1-Ghazi still had no more than 500 or 600 men. At the same moment
Anusha, who was only 14 at the time, led 200 men on to the battlefield and, realising
that the situation was critical, he at once hurled himself at the enemy flank with great
courage. His father then attacked the body of the army with 70 to 80 men while the
remainder of his force tackled the wings, shouting ‘the enemy is fleeing’. This caused
the enemy to flee in great disorder. ‘Abd al-‘Aziz only just saved himself by
swimming the river, but many of his men drowned and others were taken prisoner.
Anusha was rewarded for his exploit with the town of Hazarasp, and he was also

given a flag and troops of his own. 25
Hajji Mir, whose account is bound to be more impartial than that of the self-styled
hero of the battle, also writes that ‘Abd al-“Aziz came close to being killed, but this is
said to have occurred during the battle of Karmina which, according to him, ended as
a Bukharan victory. He says nothing about a subsequent battle taking place between
Karmina and the frontier, which he would have certainly mentioned if indeed Abi ’1Ghazi won the overwhelming victory which is described by Anusha. In any case, if
Anusha's story is true, it is difficult to understand why his father did not try to follow
up his success and pursue the Bukharan army before returning to Khwarazm, unless
the river in question was the Amu-Darya and the spot reached was far from any
suitable crossing-place. But to return to Hajji Mir's account of the battle of Karmina,
as soon as ‘Abd al-“Aziz heard that Abi ’1-Ghazi had been attacking the area around
Bukhara and devastating the countryside from Bukhara to Karmina, he gathered a
large army and marched against him. Abi ’1-Ghazi and his army held the bridge at
Karmina and stood firm. A battle took place during which one of the Khwarazmians
tried to kill ‘Abd al-‘Aziz. However, he was warded. off by a certain Kichik Ughlan
who struck him twice with his sword, and the battle ended with a sound
Khwarazmian defeat. Abi ’1-Ghazi and his army fled back to Khwarazm, from where

he wrote to offer his submission and friendship. After this ‘he was obedient and
brotherly, and sent gifts (to Bukhara) every year’
.6
25 Abi ’1-Ghazi, tr. 352-6, text 329-33.
26 Ibid., tr. 356-7, text 333-4. Hajji Mir, 276a-7b.

272

1651-81
This last statement is difficult to accept, for according to Anusha his father

undertook two more campaigns against the khanate, one the following year against
Vardanzi and another four years later, and it was only after the second campaign that
peace was at last established between the two countries. In any case it is interesting to
note that a few months after the Karmina campaign, which may or may not have
ended with a Khwarazmian success on the way to the frontier, ‘Abd al-‘Aziz's
ambassador to Iran kidnapped his Khwarazmian counterpart, in protest against Abi
’I-Ghazi's attacks on the khanate. The Bukharan ambassador could hardly have acted
thus if the two countries were then at peace, as claimed by Hajji Mir.
The unseemly detention of the Khwarazmian by his fellow-ambassador in the
Year of the Fowl (March

1657-March

1658) did not last long, as Shah ‘Abbas

insisted that he must be released at once. However, although ‘Abbas II was
uncompromising about this breach of ambassadorial immunity, he did not hold ‘Abd
al-“Aziz responsible for his envoy's behaviour. According to the Shah's Court
historian, he took the view instead that the ambassador had acted on his own initiative
and in ignorance of the rules of diplomatic conduct. He accordingly had the Bukharan
treated courteously during the remainder of his stay. Doubtless the Shah felt that it
was in his own interest to be on good terms with ‘Abd al-‘Aziz, for the Bukharan
armies had shown themselves capable of undertaking valuable diversionary action in
the area of Kabul and he might need to call upon them again in the event of a new

Mughal attack on Qandahar.?7
That same year another incident took place, which could easily have led to a total
disruption of Irano-Bukharan relations. The incident was caused by Husam Khan,
who attacked Maruchaq again and was taken prisoner with all his tribe. Fortunately
Qasim Muhammad, who had apparently intended to march with him, had taken no
part in this campaign, and in view of the fact that the Iranian army had been entirely
successful Shah “Abbas was able to ignore the incident altogether. However, ‘Abd al-

“Aziz probably reprimanded his nephew, which may be why Qasim Muhammad tried
to seek revenge by offering to help Subhan Quli topple him a year later.28
Meanwhile the Siberian Bukharan Seitkul Ablin was sent back to China in 1658.
Soon after his return home in September 1657 Ablin had heard that Baikov was in
difficulties, the Emperor having refused to take the Tsar's letter directly from him.
Ablin at once offered to go back and help Baikov, while also discharging another
commercial mission for the Tsar. Tsar Aleksei accepted his offer but, as he was
reluctant to send an expatriate from Bukhara as his sole representative, he named a
Muscovite petty officer from Tara, Ivan Perfil'ev, to be Ablin's travel companion and
to lead the mission. The greatest share of responsibility in choosing suitable gifts and
goods, however, was given to Ablin who purchased many of these in Moscow.
Altogether 750 roubles were allocated for this purpose, including 200 roubles’ worth
of sables, foxes, ermines, mirrors and cloth for the Emperor, plus 50 roubles' worth
of green tobacco and other gifts for the Khoshout Qalmaq Ablai on the way. In
exchange Perfil'ev and Ablin were told to buy emeralds, pearls and other precious
stones in China, on condition that they were not too expensive and that the maximum
profit could be made for the Treasury. They were also to try and bring back Chinese
experts at working gold, silver, diamonds, enamel and metal.
They were still expected to hand over their gifts and accrediting letter to no one

27 Muhammad Tahir Wahid, ‘Abbdsndma, 229. Muhammad Yusuf Walih, 260b.
28 Muhammad Tahir Wahid, ‘Abbasnama, 257.

273

‘Abd al- ‘Aziz

but the Emperor himself. However, if this was denied them and they were assured
that no other envoys were ever allowed to ‘visit the Bogdykhan (the Emperor) or to
see his royal eyes’, then they were permitted to disregard the Tsar's instructions and
to follow the local customs.
By the time the expedition was ready Baikov had returned safely from China,
which meant that the original reason for sending Ablin and Perfil'ev was no longer
valid. However, their mission went ahead, for Tsar Aleksei was keen to build on his

earlier success and to explore further the advantages of trading with China. He
revised

his letter for the Emperor,

omitting

all reference

to Baikov

or to the

unfortunate clashes of Muscovite and Chinese nationals near the river Amur which
were thought to have caused the difficulties faced by Baikov. His alleged descent
from Augustus Caesar, Rurik and other great Christian rulers was still mentioned,

however, as were the embassies which he had previously exchanged with Muslim
rulers. The Tsar explained that he had not attempted to establish relations with China
in the past because of the great distance separating their countries. He had recently
found out, however, that the Emperor was in contact with his neighbours, and since
Siberia and the Emperor's lands were adjacent to each other, he offered friendship,
love and ‘constant relations’. He asked the Emperor to send an ambassador with a
letter announcing the despatch of traders to Muscovy with ‘goods useful’ to him,
promising in exchange to send anything that the Emperor might require.
Little is known about the mission itself except that once again it was a huge
financial success. The envoys were back in 1662, having made a profit of over 550
roubles. The Emperor had given them a large quantity of rich gifts to take back to the
Tsar. These included 22 lb of silver, 25 lengths of rich-damask, 3 lengths of velvet, 3
beavers, 3 snow leopards and no less than 168 kg of ‘the herb tea’ which the envoys
promptly sold in Beijing, receiving over 3 lb of silver in exchange. With this and the
proceeds of their other sales they were able to buy large quantities of rubies,
sapphires and other precious stones, most of which Perfilev delivered in Moscow in
1662. Some materials, beavers and precious stones were stolen from them on the way
but Ablin recovered much of this from the Qalmaq three years later - quite a feather in

his cap, for the items in question were worth over 250 roubles.?9
But to return to the khanate. In 1658 Abi ’1-Ghazi raided Vardanzi in the northern

part of the khanate, taking back some captives.3° This time ‘Abd al-‘Aziz did not try
to retaliate, either because the raid was a minor one, or else because he was more
concerned with ending Qalmaq attacks on the eastern frontiers of the khanate.
According to Chinese sources, in that year an army of 38,000 marched from Bukhara
to the river Talas under a certain Abudu (‘Abd al-) Shukur. Although the Khoshout

Galdan only had 3,000 men with him, he attacked, routed and pursued the
Bukharans, killing their general and taking 300 prisoners. Satisfied with his
achievement, he chose to return the prisoners a little while later and he took them back
to the Bukharan frontier, ‘two to a horse’ before returning to his encampment.3!
At this stage ‘Abd al-‘Aziz renewed his diplomatic ties with India. It was
particularly important for him to do so in view of his brother's embassy to Shah
29 Russko-kitaiskie otnosheniya, I, 217-34, 250-1.

30 Aba ’1-Ghazi, tr. 356, text 333.
31 Kalmytskie istoriko-literaturnye pamayatniki, 84. It is, of course, possible that this was a
Kashghariyan army, for Kashghariya was also known as Bukhariya. Thus in 1691 a former ruler
of the Kashghariyan capital, Yarkend, was described as ‘Bukharan’ by the Qalmaq envoys to
Siberia. Rumyantsey, 407.

274

1651-81

Jahan the previous year, for Subhan Quli may have been trying to gain the Emperor's
friendship. ‘Abd al-‘Aziz therefore decided to set the record Straight with a letter
which was delivered by Qadi ‘Aud Sharif, possibly in July 1658.
He began by wishing the Emperor that ‘the misfortunes of rebellion and anarchy
should never come near him’, possibly a veiled reference to the bitter conflict between

Shah Jahan's four sons which had begun when Shah Jahan fell seriously ill in
September 1657, and had continued since his recovery. ‘Abd al-‘Aziz then said that
he wanted to establish friendly relations and ambassadorial exchanges with Shah
Jahan similar to those existing in the days of their ancestors. So far, however,
‘someone's behaviour’ (Subhan Quli's?) had interfered with his plans. Following
upon this “Abd al-‘Aziz made reference to Shah Jahan's illness, saying that he had
heard about it and that ‘for that reason’ he had sent to enquire about (the Emperor'
health?). He went on to inveigh against his brother at length, although without
mentioning him by name. First he reminded Shah Jahan of the many wicked,
improper and stupid deeds committed by Subhan Quli. Then he recalled his brother's
lack of respect towards his own father, as well as his shameless and ungrateful
actions against himself. And finally he complained that Subhan Quli had wilfully
stopped many a Bukharan ambassador from reaching India.
This letter unfortunately arrived too late to make a useful impact on the Emperor.
Shah Jahan was already a prisoner of Aurangzib's, a state of affairs which endured
until his death in 1666 and which began after his only champion, Dara Shikih, was
defeated by Aurangzib in June 1658. No answer is known to have been sent by Shah
Jahan, and if he read it he must have smiled ruefully at the khan's wishes for peace,
success and freedom from rebellion and anarchy.32 The letter was eventually
answered by Aurangzib, who became de facto ruler of India after taking prisoner his
erstwhile ally and possible rival, Murad Bakhsh, and crowning himself Emperor on
31 July 1658. But first he chose to question the credentials of ‘Abd al-‘Aziz's

ambassador.
Qadi ‘Aud Sharif appears to have caused offence. In his letter to “Abd al-*Aziz
Aurangzib complained in vague terms both about the envoy's displeasing behaviour
and about a letter which did not conform with the rules of etiquette.33 Clearly the
envoy and his master had offended Aurangzib, either by referring to him as shahzada
(Prince), and not as Emperor, or simply by addressing a letter to his father and not to
him. However, ‘Abd al-‘Aziz's next letter, which was delivered once again by Qadi

‘Aud,34 smoothed the new Emperor's ruffled feelings and when Aurangzib wrote
again some months later, he adopted a very different tone.
By then Aurangzib had defeated his brother Shuja*. Dara Shikuh, who had fled
from Lahore to Ahmadabad in January 1659, was preparing to march on Agra, but
Aurangzib felt confident of victory. However, although he foresaw no difficulties in
their next encounter, Aurangzib must have been aware that his attitude towards his
father and brothers was making him unpopular with his fellow Muslim rulers and that
Dara Shikih might seek help from the rulers of Iran and Bukhara. He therefore tried
to win ‘Abd al-‘Aziz over by alleging that they both had similar problems with their
brothers. In the letter which Qadi ‘Aud took back to the khanate, Aurangzib began by
acknowledging the khan's message of love and friendship. He then described the
32 Nizamutdinov, Iz istorii sredneaziatsko-indiiskikh otnoshenii, 92. CHI, IV, 211-4.

33 [hid., 214-5, 222. Muhammad Salih, Bahdr, BL Or. 178, 27a-29a.
34 AJso called Hajji ‘Aud in one of Aurangzib's letters.

275

‘Abd al- ‘Aziz

sequence of events which had led to Dara Shikuh's discomfiture, presenting his own
victory at Lahore as a triumph for Islam against one known for his lax views on
religion and for his encouragement of free-thinkers. He made it clear that this victory
was also a remarkable achievement, for Dara's army numbered 100,000 men who
had fought courageously and fiercely. He went on to refer to ‘Abd al-‘Aziz's
complaints against Subhan Quli, and he closed with an offer of help. “Abd al-‘Aziz's
pleasure on receiving this letter must have been increased still further when a Mughal
envoy called ‘Abid Khwajah arrived in Bukhara shortly afterwards with another letter
from the Emperor. This ‘letter of love’, Aurangzib explained, was sent to reinforce
their alliance and ‘Abid Khwajah was also entrusted with a more comprehensive oral

answer to ‘Abd al-‘Aziz's original letter.35
‘Abd al-‘Aziz's appeal for help against Subhan Quli had thus been successful, but
a similar attempt to canvass Shah ‘Abbas's support, which was made by Subhan Quli
some time after September 1658, achieved nothing. The man chosen for this mission

was a sayyid from Balkh, a fact which ought to have impressed the Shi‘a monarch
favourably. But, although Shah Khwajah Uzbeg was treated very kindly, he was
soon dismissed without any offer of help. ‘Abbas II was not eager to get involved in
the brothers' disputes, and in any case he had a longer history of relations with ‘Abd

al-‘Aziz, which he did not want to prejudice.36

During 1659 the truce between Subhan Quli and Qasim Muhammad came to an
end. There is much conflicting evidence about the exact sequence of events that
followed, and about which of the two Princes betrayed the other.37 Shah ‘Abbas's
biographer believes that Qasim Muhammad offered to help Subhan Quli gain the
throne of Bukhara and asked for troops, only to invite them to a banquet and have
them killed. However, Subhan Quli, who had followed the men over, managed to get
away. He determined on revenge and when he heard some time later that the Yuz tribe
had rebelled against his brother and taken him prisoner, he at once ordered them to

put him to death.3® Other historians say that Qasim Muhammad was invited to Balkh
allegedly to discuss peace, but was killed by his brother's emissaries on the way.
Hajji Mir's version does not mention underhand behaviour by either of the
brothers. He puts the blame on certain unnamed amirs for making Qasim Muhammad
dissatisfied with the agreement reached with Subhan Quli. Qasim Muhammad began
to attack and plunder the neighbourhood of Balkh. Subhan Quli therefore marched
against him with an army and Qasim Muhammad was killed. This apparently

happened in the month of Muharram 1070/September 1659,39 and ‘Abd al-‘Aziz at
once prepared to march on Balkh allegedly to avenge his nephew. In fact he had felt
little love for his nephew and had resented his ambitious schemes. But Qasim
Muhammad's death provided him with a useful pretext for marching against Subhan

35 CHI, IV, 215, 222-3, 226. Muhammad Salih, Bahar, Ethé 2090, 13b-16a, 16b-17b; BL Or.178,
24b-26b.

36 Muhammad Tahir Wahid, ‘Abbdsndama, 241.
37 Munshi Muhammad (II, 442-3) and Muhammad Yisuf Munshi (266a-b) both indict Subhan Quii.
Muhammad Tahir Wahid (‘Abbdsnama, 257) and Saqi (28) indict QasimMuhammad.

38 Muhammad Tahir Wahid, ‘Abbdsnama, 257-8.
39 Hajji Mir, 269a, gives the year as 1068, which would make it October 1657, but this seems
incorrect, as all other sources place the event some time in 1069-70, in the Turkish Year of the
Pig, ie., March 1659-March

1660 (Muhammad Yusuf Walih, 273a, Muhammad Tahir Wahid,

258), the Hijra year 1070, i.e. September 1659-September 1660 (Qipchaq Khan, 276b), and also
in the second year of Aurangzib's reign, i.e., 31 July 1658-31 July 1659 (Saqi, 28).

276

1651-81

Quli who had always been a difficult vassal and who, not long before, had once again

robbed and detained an ambassador on his way from Bukhara to India.40
“Abd al-‘Aziz gathered an army but Subhan Quli did not want to fight. Afraid of
his brother's superior skill in the field, he asked Khwajah ‘Abd al-Ghaffar and others
to mediate, and once again, as in 1645, the khwajah's conciliatory words saved Balkh
and persuaded two warring Ashtarkhanids to make peace. When in Sha‘ban
1070/April 1660 Subhan Quli agreed to undertake a course of religious studies under
“Abd al-Ghaffar's supervision, ‘Abd al-‘Aziz gave up the intended expedition. No
doubt “Abd al-Ghaffar, whom Aurangzib kept fully informed about his numerous
battles both in Bijapur and against his brothers, wrote to tell the Emperor of his
achievement.

This news

was

bound

to have

been most

welcome,

for Qasim

Muhammad's recent troops movements had given rise to a rumour, a few months
earlier, of a joint Irano-Bukharan attack. Aurangzib had been so concerned by this
news that a factor of the East India Company was told that the Emperor was ‘to
remove very suddenly in June 1659 from Delhi to Lahore, there to waite the motion
of the Persian army, which, with the aide of the Ouzbeage Tartar, is entered the
Indian territory’.4!
“Abd al-‘Aziz took advantage of the peace concluded with his brother to send
ambassador Qulim Hajji to Isfahan, where he delivered two tigers and other gifts,
and almost certainly brought Shah ‘Abbas up-to-date on the latest events in the
khanate. In view of the good relations now prevailing between the brothers, ‘Abbas II
decided to strengthen his links with both of them. He accordingly sent ambassadors
both to Bukhara and to Balkh, with letters in which he presumably expressed his joy
at their reconciliation. And shortly afterwards ‘Abd al-‘Aziz responded with a letter
which Khwajah Mehr Amin delivered some time between March 1660 and March
1661.42
“Abd al-‘Aziz, who was a keen collector of manuscripts, is likely to have made

use of this period of peace in order to increase his extensive library. He collected
works on Sufism, on the Qur‘an, on the Arabic language and even on medicine. He
apparently liked to write his own official letters and gave calligraphers so much time
for their work that some outstandingly beautiful books were produced during his
reign. Moreover his knowledge of religion was such that he could issue religious
decisions as well as any mufti.43
It is not known whether or not Subhan Quli reached his level of learning thanks to
‘Abd al-Ghaffar's tuition, but he took a serious interest in study and poetry while also
pursuing diplomatic initiatives and he was able to make use of this breathing-space in
order to establish independent relations with Aurangzib. By then there was no doubt
that Aurangzib would retain the throne of India. He had disposed of two of his
brothers, Dara Shikih and Shah Shuja‘, and the third was in prison. His nephews
and even his own son, Muhammad Sultan, had also been thrown into prison for
having dared to espouse Shuja‘'s cause.44 Clearly it was important for Subhan Quli

40 Qipchaq Khan, 278b.
41 Hajji Mir, 269b-72b. Qabil Khan, 620-30. English factories, 1655-60, 198.

42 Muhammad Tahir Wahid, ‘Abbdsndma, 263. Eodem, Munsha’at, 15a-b. Muhammad Yusuf
Walih, 287a-b.
43 Semenov, Sobranie, pass. Muhammad Yusuf Munshi, 270a-2a.

44 CHI, IV, 215, 222, 225-8. Dara had been executed on 9 September 1659. Shah Shuja’ had fled to
Chittagong, where he was eventually killed in January 1661 after the discovery of his plan to

seize the area and march on Bengal.

‘Abd al-‘Aziz

to be on good terms with this ruthless, powerful ruler, in order to neutralise any
efforts which ‘Abd al-‘Aziz might make to get his support. He accordingly launched
his diplomatic offensive in January 1661, probably with the support and
encouragement of his new tutor, Khwajah “Abd al-Ghaffar.
Subhan Quli's first envoy, Qalij Bik, appears to have been a mere courier, for he
is dismissed rather summarily by Aurangzib's Court historian, Munshi Muhammad
Kazim. On 24 Jumada 1/24 January 1661 he is said to have delivered 28 horses and
some fruit from Balkh. In return he was given a robe and was generally treated “with
much kindness’ before his dismissal some two weeks later.45 Subhan Quli's second
embassy is described in much more detail by the same historian. The envoy, Ibrahim
Bik, was apparently a highly-placed official. He arrived only a month after Qalij Bik,
on 26 Jumada II/26 February 1661. He brought a letter and a variety of presents for
the Emperor, including ‘precious things’ of the area, ‘large presents’, Turki horses,
camels and hunting-birds. He was treated as a very honoured guest, for it was now
20 months since Aurangzib's official coronation of 15 June 1659 and his was the first
foreign message of congratulations received. A Mughal official in charge of Court
ceremonial was sent to bring him to the Emperor. After his audience he was given a
bejewelled belt, a valuable robe and 15,000 rupees, then he was taken to a ‘suitable
abode’ and a mehmandar was appointed to wait upon him. When he fell ill shortly
afterwards the Emperor ordered a doctor to be sent to him. His second audience took
place on 5 March and, although by that date an envoy from Shah ‘Abbas had arrived
in Delhi to congratulate Aurangzib on his accession, Ibrahim Bik was still treated with
special consideration. This time he was given valuable coins from the Emperor's
weighing ceremony and also a bejewelled staff, perhaps as a tactful allusion to his
recent illness. But the ambassador was seriously ill and all the Emperor's kindness
did not prevent him from dying a few days later, apparently of syphilis. Aurangzib
appears to have been disconcerted by his unexpected death, and in order to
demonstrate his goodwill towards Subhan Quli, he rewarded Ibrahim Bik's
companions and sent them back at once to tell their master the news.46
A few months later ‘Abd al-“Aziz sent a major embassy to Aurangzib. There were
several reasons for this. It was high time for him to acknowledge ‘Abid Khwajah's
embassy of 1659. He wanted to thank Aurangzib for his offer of help and to explain
that he had not taken it up because of an improvement in his relations with Subhan
Quli. It was also important for him not to allow his brother to build up too good a
rapport with the Emperor, for it might eventually detract from his own relations with
Aurangzib. In June 1661 Aurangzib was therefore informed that a prestigious
ambassador from ‘Abd al-‘Aziz had reached Kabul. This was Khwajah Ahmad
Husain Nagshbandi, son of ‘one of the greatest khwajahs of Ma wara’ al-nahr’,
Khwajah Khawand Mahmid, whose ancestor, Khwajah Ahrar, was wellremembered for his great influence in Samargand during the fifteenth century.
Aurangzib was delighted to hear of the arrival of such an eminent ambassador. He
regarded this as confirmation that ‘Abd al-‘Aziz had decided to follow the example of
Subhan Quli and Shah ‘Abbas and to accept, like them, the executions in September
1659 and January 1661 of Dara Shikth and Shah Shuja‘, disregarding the fact that
they had both faced trumped-up charges. Since Aurangzib's reputation had clearly not
suffered as a result, he would not hesitate to dispose of Murad Bakhsh who was

45 Munshi Muhammad, II, 605-6.
46 Thid., II, 606-8. Khafi Khan, II, 130. Saqi, 34.
278

1651-81

executed a few months later on the charge of having murdered a major official.
But to return to Khwajah Ahmad's embassy, in view of his high standing an
official was sent all the way to Kabul to meet him and bring him to Delhi. Khwajah
Ahmad arrived in Delhi on 4 Rabi‘II/27 November 1661 and delivered a very friendly
letter of congratulation, some Turki horses, two-humped camels, hunting-birds and
other gifts, including a ruby worth 40,000 rupees. He was given a valuable robe, a
dagger with a pearl chain, 8,000 rupees and also a bejewelled staff because the
Emperor knew him to be exhausted after his long journey. That same night he was
invited to watch brilliantly illuminated boats sail down the Jumna. A week later
several valuable coins from Aurangzib's solar weighing ceremony were delivered to
him. Further generous gifts, including some pieces of calico and a bejewelled dagger
with a pearl chain, followed on 1 Rajab/20 February and 24 Rajab/14 March 1662,
after which date the ambassador and his suite were dismissed. Khwajah Ahmad's
visit had lasted less than four months. It had been highly successful, but when the
khwajah reached Lahore in late April 1662 he fell ill and died.4’
His death, like that of Ibrahim Bik, is attributed by Mughal historians to the
recurrence of an old illness, perhaps because they thought that some shadow would
fall upon the Emperor's good name if they admitted that the ambassadors had fallen ill
during their stay. But a more objective view of these deaths is provided by two
westerners, who were then at Aurangzib's Court. Referring at length to the
ambassadors from the khanate who came to congratulate Aurangzib on his accession,
Bernier, who was Aurangzib's doctor, says that many of them died ‘parce qu'ils
n'étoient pas accoutumés aux chaleurs de l'Hindoustan, ou plutét parce qu'ils étoient
mal propres & qu'ils se nourrissoient trés mal’. Both he and the Italian Manucci say
that the ambassadors put away the money given to them by the Emperor and lived
sordidly, even to the extent of eating sick horses and camels.48 Manucci adds that

they were very dirty and that instead of wiping their hands and moustaches after
eating, they would ‘rub one hand against the other to warm the fat, and then pass both
hands over their face, moustache and beard’, their philosophy being that “he is most
lovely who is the most greasy’.
Neither Bernier nor Manucci appear to have been very impressed with the envoys
generally. Bernier was rather shocked to find that they were perfectly happy to
perform the humiliating ‘Salam, ou salut a l'Indienne mettant trois fois la main sur la
téte & l‘abaissant autant de fois jusques en terre...quoiqu'il ressente un peu
l'esclave’. He found them ill-mannered, ignorant about their own country's outlying
regions and boastful about their skill as bowmen. He was particularly amused to hear
their stories of the wonderful warrior women of the khanate, one of whom was said
to have cut down, single-handed, a contingent of between 25 and 30 Indian soldiers

in 1647. In fact it would appear that such women warriors did exist, for Manucci
records that many were sold by the ambassadors in India and that one of them was
subsequently employed to guard the Emperor at night. However, he has little good to
say about the ambassadors. He claims that on leaving Delhi after receiving rich gifts

47 Munshi Muhammad, II, 628-9, 637-8, 644, 662, 664, 738. Saqi, 37-8, says 120,000 rupees were
spent on Khwajah Ahmad and his party. Hajji Mir, 278a-b.
48 Neither Bernier nor Manucci seems to have grasped such details as the ambassadors’ correct names,
countries, or dates of arrival. Manucci says they all came from Balkh and stayed four months in
Delhi. Bernier believed that they were sent by the kings of Samarqand and Balkh. However, as
both of them insisted that the ambassador whose gifts for the Emperor they described in detail
stayed 4 months, it seems likely that they were referring Khwajah Ahmad.

279

‘Abd al- ‘Aziz

from the Emperor, they visited the houses of several noblemen and helped themselves
there, not only to the betel leaves proffered to them as parting gifts, but also to the
silver dishes in which the leaves had been placed!
Manucci and Bernier provide a unique description of Khwajah Ahmad's audience
with the Emperor. Although he and his party approached quite near to Aurangzib,
they were not allowed to hand their letters directly to him. An official took the letters
and gave them to Aurangzib. The Emperor, says Bernier, then read the letters,49
directing each of the ‘ambassadors’ to be given a Ser-apah, i.e., a brocade robe with
a silk sash and a turban (to match). After this part of the proceedings was over the
presents were delivered. There is little doubt that a lot of thought had been put into
gathering a rich and varied assortment of items which might please the Emperor.
However, only Bernier and Manucci describe them in detail. Mughal writers are
disappointingly vague in their acounts of these ‘precious things’, ‘delicacies of Turan’
and ‘fruit’. There seem to have been nine lapis-lazuli boxes filled with musk and with
an aromatic medicinal root called zedoary, which was considered as a panacea for all
evils and which, in contemporary Iran, was four times as valuable as gold. There
were also boxes of saganqur aphrodisiac, which, according to Manucci, was a ‘kind
of fish’ and a much-prized commodity, the variety found ‘in a certain stream of the
kingdom of Balkh’ being four times as powerful as the similar ‘instinco’ of Mecca.
Among the camels and horses presented to the Emperor there were 80 long-haired
camels of great strength, 80 fine Turki horses, and also one small horse ‘well made,
lively and of such singular activity that it could travel eighty leagues in 24 hours
without any difficulty’. Finally, there were 100 camels laden with fresh melons,
apples, pears, pomegranates and seedless grapes, and another 100 which carried
dried fruit such as apricots, Bukharan plums, which Manucci calls the ‘best in the
world’, and four types of raisins, as well as nuts, filberts, pine-nuts, almonds and
pistachio nuts. Aurangzib was very pleased with these gifts. After dismissing the
envoys to their quarters, he had the little horse tried out by sending him to Agra, 76
miles away, and when the horse covered this enormous distance in one day, between
sunrise and sunset, the Emperor was delighted. He named the horse ‘Bad raftar’
(‘Swift as the wind’) and, according to Manucci, he subsequently prized him more
than ‘the choicest horses from Persia and Arabia’.
During their stay the ambassador and his party sold horses, camels, musk,
beavers and hides, and when they left each was given two rich Ser-apahs and 8,000
rupees. The Emperor also sent with them several lengths of material - fine white
material used for making veils, cloth striped with silver or gold, rich brocade together with 5 pairs of large carpets, 2 daggers with bejewelled handles, 5 flasks of
essence of roses and 9 costly ser-apahs for their master. He too had put together an
interesting variety of gifts for his opposite number!5°
At about the same time as he was preparing Khwajah Ahmad's embassy ‘Abd al‘Aziz sent an historic embassy to Kashghariya. This was not only the first embassy
from the khanate in nearly eighty years, it was also the first time since the expedition
to Kashghar of 1594 that the ruler of the khanate expressed support for the ruler of

Kashghariya, and not for one of his rivals. The occasion was all the more significant
because, since his accession in 1636, ‘Abdallah of Kashghariya had generally been
unfriendly towards the khanate. He had attacked Bolor and Badakhshan in 1640-1
49 Manucci says he just handed it over to the person who was to write the official answer.

50 Bernier, 158-65. Manucci, Storia, Il, 36-44.

280

1651-81

and had launched two attacks on Andijan circa 1653. Since then he had left the
khanate alone, concentrating instead on trying to exterminate the Qirghiz, whom he
thought

of as

‘lions of the wilds

of Moghulistan,

unbalanced,

uncouth

and

treacherous’. After 1655-6 ‘Abdallah had also been fighting his own nephew,
Ibrahim, ruler of Chalish and Turfan. It is tempting to think that ‘Abdallah's alliance
with “Abd al-‘Aziz's vassal, the Qazaq ruler Jahangir, may have helped to pave the
way for the embassy of 1661.5! It is more likely, however, that ‘Abd al-‘Aziz at last
felt free, after the peace agreement with his brother, to widen the scope of his foreign
relations in order to increase his prestige both in Bukhara and in Balkh.
The ruler of Kashghariya was particularly pleased to receive ‘Abd al-‘Aziz's
envoy Shaikhum Quli and his ‘numerous presents and offerings’ because he had
recently suffered a defeat at the hands of the Qalmaq. He wasted no time in arranging
a lavish return embassy, and in 1072/after 27 August 1661 his ambassador, Tini Bik,
set off for the khanate. Tini Bik travelled with his brother, and was accompanied by
the head of the merchants’ guild of Yarkand, together with an envoy from ‘Abdallah's
son Yulbars, a very large escort of 20 officials and 10 ‘members from each
(Kashghariyan) regiment’. The Kashghariyan chronicler Shah Mahmid describes the
embassy as having ‘ten times more luxury and grandeur than (was) ever seen before’.
He showers praises on Tini Bik for his ‘industry, high moral qualities and valour’,
adding that when the ambassador reached Bukhara via Andijan, he executed his
mission with great elegance, good manners and tact. In fact Tini Bik's conversation
so pleased “Abd al-‘Aziz, who prided himself on his own gift for self-expression, that
he sent a second envoy, called Shah Bik, to accompany him back to Kashghariya,
and ‘Abdallah returned the compliment. Shah Bik set off on the return journey to the
khanate in the company of a second Kashghariyan ambassador, but here the exchange
of embassies came to an abrupt end, for the two envoys were attacked and robbed in

Andijan, and they only just managed to escape with their lives. 52
While his brother exchanged friendly embassies with the Kashghariyan ruler,
Subhan Quli sent another ambassador to Isfahan who arrived there in 1661-2 and
insisted on speaking directly to the Shah. This was agreed and, although nothing is
known about the conversation, it is clear that Subhan Quli was making progress with
his diplomatic campaign and had succeeded in developing his own relations with
Shah ‘Abbas, independently of his brother.

During the Year of the Tiger/ between March 1662 and March 1663 Abu ’1-Ghazi
launched his last attack on the khanate. He got as far as Bukhara and according to his
son, he did not try to enter the town although for ten whole days he ravaged the area
adjoining the Namazgah gate. This, Anusha suggests, was because Abu ’1-Ghazi did
not want to take advantage, either of ‘Abd al-‘Aziz's absence from the town, or of the
fact that the town was totally undefended, except by women. But in the light of Abu
’1-Ghazi's previous campaigns against the khanate it seems unlikely that his motives
were as chivalrous as his son makes out. He was probably not equipped for a siege,
and if indeed the women were of the type described by Manucci, he may have thought
it wiser not to try and seize the town from them, in case he suffered the disgrace of a
defeat at their hands. Satisfied with the immense booty and the prisoners taken, and

feeling that he had sufficiently avenged those of his ancestors who had perished in
1593, Abi ’1-Ghazi left the khanate. On his return to Khiva he made peace with

51 Shah Mahmid, 70a, 74b, 75b; also 129.
52 Shah Mahmid, 77a-b. Muhammad Badi‘, LOIVAN, 380a.

281

‘Abd al- ‘Aziz

Bukhara and abdicated in favour of his son. He was now 60 years old. He had
apparently decided to spend the remainder of his days in prayer and in fighting the
Qizilbash and the Qalmaq, but in the event he was to die only a few months later
during the month of Ramadan 1073, i.e., between 9 April and 9 May 1663.
A little earlier Aba ’1-Ghazi and ‘Abd al-‘Aziz had each sent ambassadors to Iran.
‘Abd al-‘Aziz had thought it necessary to send three envoys to represent him, which
seems significant, although it is not known what message they might have carried,
apart from the standard ‘expressions of friendship and devotion’. Whether they came
to ask for help against Aba ’1-Ghazi, or to announce that peace had at last been
concluded between the two countries, is a matter for speculation. But the Shah was
determined not to take sides. He therefore took pains to treat all the envoys exactly the
same. They received from him ‘many kindnesses and favours’ and when they left

they were accompanied by Iranian envoys.
Contact between Bukhara and Muscovy had not been resumed since Nadir
Muhammad's abdication. There were two reasons for this, as far as ‘Abd al-‘Aziz
was concerned. On the one hand, he had spent most of his time fighting his brother.
On the other hand, Abu ’1-Ghazi's overt hostility for the khanate would have made
any attempt to send embassies to Muscovy virtually impossible. Similarly Tsar
Aleksei had been fully occupied since his accession, dealing with internal and external
problems. Within Muscovy he had been trying to replenish his empty Treasury by
various expedients, and coping with the rebellions which followed. He had also been
very concerned with events in Little Russia where the Cossacks were trying to rid
themselves of Polish sovereignty and also to rid the Uniate Church of its Catholic
veneer. Their leader, Bogdan Khmelnitsky, had turned to Moscow for support as
early as 1648, but Tsar Aleksei had not wanted war with Poland. Early in 1654 he at
last accepted Bogdan Khmelnitsky's offer of vassalage, and at once Poland and her

ally, the Khan of Crimea, declared war. The war began with Russian successes, but
fighting on this front was suspended during the war between Muscovy and Sweden
over the fate of Livonia from 1656 until 1659-60.
When the fighting with Poland was resumed Tsar Aleksei's armies suffered
serious setbacks. In 1661, following defeats near Moscow and at Lvov, Tsar Aleksei
issued two rulings which show clearly that he feared the possibility of collusion
between his Muslim neighbours, including ‘Abd al-‘Aziz, and those of his subjects
who were Muslims such as the Noghays and the Tatars. By the first of these rulings,
which was issued in September, he agreed to take the Noghays' Little Horde under
his protection provided, among other things, that they promised neither to have

diplomatic relations with Turkey, Crimea and other kingdoms, nor to move (to the
lands ruled by) the Sultan, the Shah, the Bukharan ruler and others. By the second
ruling, which he issued on 18 October, he instructed the voevoda of Astrakhan to
prevent the teziki who came to Astrakhan, whether Bukharan, ‘Kizilbash’ or others,

from going to trade in nearby Tatar and Noghay encampments. Whoever tried to do
so should be arrested, and the voevoda and his colleagues were urged to report at
once any sign of wavering in the loyalty of the Tatars or Noghays, or any tendency
on their part to favour Bukhara, Crimea or the Turks. This did not mean, however,

that Tsar Aleksei was generally against the idea of receiving envoys from the khanate
or from “Yurgench’. On the contrary, the Astrakhan voevoda was still instructing the
captain of the Astrakhan busa, three days after the Tsar's second ruling, to take on

53 Abii ’I-Ghazi, tr. 356-7, text 333-4. Muhammad Tahir Wahid, ‘Abbasndma, 318.
282

1651-81
board any ambassadors from Bukhara, Balkh or Yurgench who might want to come

to Russia from Karagan.54
Meanwhile lively links were maintained between the khanate and India at different
levels. Not only the Juibari shaikhs and ‘Abd al-‘Aziz's spiritual director Khwajah
‘Abd al-Ghaffar, but also many clerics and officials from the khanate wrote regularly
to the Mughal Emperor. Their letters seem to have been fairly standard in their
content. If we are to believe Aurangzib's Court historian, the khwajahs generally sent
messages of ‘ubudiya (humble submission) and expressed the wish that he should
live for ever. In return for such obsequious messages their envoys are known to have
been given money and permission to take back the ‘produce of Hindustan’. The
messages sent by Bukharan officials were rather similar, for a certain ‘Abd alRahman, whom Aurangzib's historian describes alternately as ‘Abd al-‘Aziz's or
Subhan Quli's diwanbegi, is reported as having sent presents and letters full of
‘expressions of devotion and sincere friendship’ to the Emperor in 1662 and 1663.
Subhan Quli and his brother were just as determined to maintain and develop their
connection with Aurangzib. In April 1663 a minor envoy from Subhan Quli brought
the Emperor some hunting-birds. In October Kuchik Bi delivered horses and huntingbirds from ‘Abd al-‘Aziz, and was dismissed within a month of his arrival. And in
December the ataliq Kupak brought the Emperor some unspecified gifts from Subhan

Quli.55
Aurangzib was pleased to receive these envoys. He valued the commercial
possibilities of the khanate, for it provided him with horses for his stables, thanks to
Khwajah ‘Abd al-Ghaffar's help and co-operation. It suited him therefore to be on
good terms with the rulers of the khanate and, although he eventually hoped to
recover from them the land of his ancestors, he fully intended to respond to their
embassies. However, due to other commitments in 1663 his answering mission was
put off until 1664. He himself spent the greater part of 1663 in Kashmir. In the northeast his armies successfully completed the conquest of Assam which they had invaded
in 1661. But in the south-west his ruthless enemy, the Maratha Shivaji, scored two
major successes: he raided Poona in 1663, penetrated into the apartments of the
viceroy at Surat, wounding Shayista Khan himself, and killing his close attendants
and his son. Then in early 1664 Shivaji went on to sack Surat. This was very serious.
Aurangzib dismissed Shayista Khan and prepared to deal with Shivaji, but before a
new commander was appointed to lead his armies in the Deccan, he sent an
ambassador to the khanate.
The ambassador who set off on 13 Dhi al-hijja/7 July 1664, with gifts and letters

for both brothers, had been carefully chosen for this double mission.>° His name was
Mustafa Khan Khafi and he was one of Aurangzib's favourites. The Emperor had a
high opinion of his honesty, intelligence and loyalty. Mustafa Khan was a capable
man, who had served under Jahangir and who had since governed Carnatic in the

54 Pares, 203-8. Riasanovsky, 196, 197-9. Sobranie uzakonenii, I, 506. D.A.1., IV, 256-9. It
should be mentioned, however, that the prohibition relating to trade in the Noghay encampments
plied to all merchants, and not only to teziki. See further in chapter 14 for the other reasons
behind this ruling.
55 Munshi Muhammad, II, 605, 814, 848, 673, 814-5, 841, 844. See Qabil Khan, 615-29 for

Aurangzib's letters to “Abd al-Ghaffar.

56 Qabil Khan, 617, 619. CHI, IV, 234-5, 257-8. Munshi Muhammad, II, 663. Akhmedoy,
Istoriya, 194, gives the earlier date of 23 Dh
mission.

283

’I-qa‘da for the beginning of Mustafa Khan's

‘Abd al-‘Aziz

south-east in 1659-60 and Surat in the north-west from 1660 to 1661.°7 The despatch

of such a high-ranking official was very flattering for the rulers of the khanate, and
they were no doubt pleased with the generous gifts which he brought them from the
Emperor. The value of these gifts was carefully graded to reflect the greater
importance of ‘Abd al-‘Aziz, for he was the older brother and also the overall ruler of

the khanate. However, it would appear that Aurangzib felt more warmth for Subhan
Quli, for, although the letter he sent him was far shorter than its original draft, it was
still longer and less impersonal than the missive sent to “Abd al-‘Aziz.
In his letter to ‘Abd al-‘Aziz Aurangzib merely expressed joy at the khan's

friendly letter, sorrow at Khwajah Ahmad's sudden death, and the hope that, after the
prompt return of his envoy, ‘the doors of correspondence’ would remain open
between them. In his letter to Subhan Quli, on the other hand, the Emperor began by
stating his overwhelming desire to uphold the cause of the true orthodox religion. He
then explained that although he had initially intended to go into all the details of his
military successes (and of his gradual elimination of his brothers and nephews, as he
did in fact in the first draft of this letter), he had decided only to mention them briefly,
because the fame of these successes had ‘spread to all countries’. He went on to say
that men of experience had ‘girded their loins with obedience and stood firmly on the
road of obedience’, possibly a hint that he expected Subhan Quli to obey his brother
in the future. And finally, after mentioning Ibrahim Bik's inopportune death, the
Emperor expressed a wish for ‘the doors of correspondence’ &c., as in his letter to
“Abd al-‘ Aziz.
No complete list of the goods which Mustafa Khan Khafi delivered to the brothers
has survived. However, Bukharan and Mughal historians agree that they were worth
150,000 and 100,000 rupees, or 600,000 and 400,000 tanga respectively. Among
them Hajji Mir mentions a bejewelled belt, a dagger belt, a valuable knife, a precious
robe, and a large and graceful horse. Munshi Muhammad Kazim adds a sword with
an enamelled handle and an elephant with a haudah to this list, and says that the horse
had a gold bridle. According to Hajji Mir, Mustafa Khan Khafi was taken to ‘a special
place’ (residence) during his stay and the ‘amirs and pillars of the State’ gave regular
banquets in his honour. But despite the Emperor's request for his prompt dismissal

he was kept in the khanate for more than two years.58
This was probably because both brothers wanted to entertain him in style, and
also because each of them was preparing to send a major embassy to accompany him
back to India. In the meantime Subhan Quli sent the ataliq Kapak to the Emperor for
the second time with a friendly letter and gifts. Kapak arrived in May 1665, and was
not detained. He was dismissed to Balkh after his audience, suitably rewarded, and
with gifts of a precious robe, a bejewelled dagger and 7,000 rupees for his master.
An envoy from ‘Abd al-‘Aziz, Muhammad Sa‘id, is also said to have visited India
during Mustafa Khan Khafi's stay in the khanate, and to have delivered fruit and
other gifts to the Emperor.59
During this period ‘Abd al-‘Aziz was on good terms both with his brother and
with Anusha of Khiva. In summer 1665, partly in order to impress the Mughal
ambassador with his zeal in advancing the cause of orthodoxy, he agreed to undertake

57 Nawwab, III, 516-7.
58 See Qabil Khan (369-73) for the letters despatched, and Muhammad Salih (Bahar, Ethé 2090,
17b-27b) for the original draft of the letter to Subhan Quli. Munshi Muhammad, II, 863-4. Saqi,

48. Hajji Mir, 278b-9a.

59 Munshi Muhammad, II, 886. Abd al-Rahim, Mughal diplomacy, 156.

284

1651-81

a joint expedition with Anusha against several towns ruled by Shah ‘Abbas. This was
an abrupt departure from ‘Abd al-‘Aziz's former alliance with Shah ‘Abbas and it may
seem particularly strange in view of the fact that he had sent an ambassador to Iran in
late 1664. However, he had little reason to be loyal to Shah ‘Abbas, since he had
never received any help from him either against Abi ’1-Ghazi or against Subhan Quli,
and in order to protect the khanate it was worthwhile encouraging Anusha to turn
against Iran in his quest for fame and booty. In any case ‘Abd al-‘Aziz may have been
offended by the reception granted to his latest envoy in January 1665, which the
French traveller and expert on precious stones, Tavernier, thought rather
unimpressive and which he describes as follows.
The ambassador went through a courtyard filled with grandees and officials, as
was usual. In the courtyard there were the usual ‘chevaux de parade’ whose
harnesses were incrusted with diamonds, rubies, emeralds, turquoises or pearls, and
who were tethered to gigantic gold nails, with ornamental gold troughs in front of
them. But only nine of these horses had been placed in the courtyard, whereas there
might have been as many as thirty if only the ambassador had come from a monarch
‘plus considéré qu'un kan de la Tartarie’. The audience took place in the middle of a
large garden where Tavernier saw a canal of running water, several fountains, three

tigers and four lions under guard. The Shah sat in the middle of a garden on a large
dais covered with magnificent carpets and gold brocade, under a canopy of 16
columns painted in azure and gold. He wore a robe of silk and gold, a coat of cloth of
gold embroidered with silver and silk, and a fur wrap of marten and sables. He had a
particularly rich belt, and on his toque he sported a heron's feather attached to a large
50 carat pearl and held in place by ‘des chaines de diamants et de rubis’. The outfits

of the Bukharan ambassador and his suite, on the other hand, were considered
inadequate and, because ‘ils n'estoient pas fort bien couverts’, the suite was made to

wait below while the ambassador walked up the four steps of the dais. He bowed
low, walked nine or ten steps towards the Shah, bowed low again, and was then
made to sit some considerable distance away ‘laissant entre le Roy et luy la place de
huit personnes’. This meant that the audience was particularly awkward and stilted,
since conversation could only be carried on through the Grand Chamberlain, who
went to and fro several times between the ambassador and the monarch. Clearly
‘Abbas II had little regard for the ruler of Bukhara.
In fact Shah ‘Abbas had taken a strong dislike to the people of the khanate.
Tavernier was told that this was because these “Tartares Usbeks’ were repeatedly
raiding the province of Mashhad.°! As a result, whenever the Shah became heated in
conversation his courtiers assumed that he was talking about the ‘Uzbeks’, and on
one such occasion Tavernier heard the Grand Chamberlain cry out that if he were but
given 4,000 mounted soldiers he would rid the Shah of this ‘canaille’! 6
This state of affairs did not improve. In early September 1665 the Muscovite
ambassador, Narbekov, reported from Iran that the combined armies of “Bukhara and
Yurgench (Khwarazm)’ had laid waste the towns of “Meshet (Mashhad), Ostrobat

(Astarabad), Farabat (Farhabad) and many others and taken many prisoners’. Shortly
afterwards the Shah began to gather an army of 50,000 men which Narbekov thought
might be used against Bukhara and Yurgench, although it was just as likely to be
60 Tavernier, Les six voyages, (1712), livre troisitme, 526-8.
61 ‘viennent souvent faire des courses du c6té de Meched’.
62 Tavernier, Les six voyages, (1712), livre troisitme, 613, 619.

285

‘Abd al-‘Aziz
intended for the defence of Qandahar, the new Emperor, whom he eroneously calis
Jahan Shah, having demanded the town from Iran and threatened to attack with a

large army. In Isfahan the French community certainly expected some military action
involving the ‘Yuzbeks’, but according to Chardin's informant, their Princes sent
ambassadors to Iran in 1666 to sue for peace and placate the Shah, and they
succeeded in their undertaking, at least temporarily.®
The following year, however, ‘Abbas II resumed his preparations for the
campaign. The German physician and naturalist Engelbert Kaempfer was told that the
Shah often talked of the expedition and was confident that he would succeed in taking
Balkh. He continued to talk about it even after he fell ill, and thinking that his

recovery was purely a matter of time, he would secretly dance for joy at the thought
of his forthcoming victory. But the Shah did not realise the seriousness of his
condition. He was suffering from syphilis, which Chardin describes as ‘cette
facheuse maladie deshoneste 4 nommer, & encore plus deshoneste 4 avoir...[qui]
publie honteusement la vilaine fréquentation qu'ils ont avec des femmes
impudiques’.®4 He died on 25 Rabi'l 1077/25 September 1666 before the campaign

had even begun, and his successor disbanded the army gathered for this purpose.®
‘Abd al-‘Aziz, who had been informed of .‘Abbas's plans, was relieved to hear
that the threat had been averted and that the new monarch was an inexperienced
nineteen-year-old who had spent all his life so far in the harem. Confident that Safi II
would not present a threat to the khanate, since he was more interested in women than
in wars, ‘Abd al-‘Aziz encouraged his people to resume their raids on Khurasan and
Iran. Anusha went even further: he marched into the province of Marw in 1667 and
laid it waste. Chardin was told that he did much damage, took all the valuable objects
of the town and the surrounding area, and met with no resistance, because he left

again with the speed of a bird of prey.®
The following year a large army from the khanate marched into Khurasan.
According to the information received early in January 1669 by an Iranian trader who
was then in Astrakhan, the area of Herat was attacked, many villages were destroyed,
camels, horses, cattle and prisoners were taken. But after the governor of Herat,
Murtada Quli, appealed to Mashhad for help, the governor of Mashhad, Khan
Shikhal, raised an army which pursued the assailants to ‘Bukhariya’. The Iranian
troops then killed many of the ‘best people’, recovered all the livestock and took
7,000 prisoners, who were sent to the Shah and put to death.®7
A very different picture is painted by Tavernier and Chardin, neither of whom
mention any ‘Uzbeg’ reversal of fortune. Tavernier writes that, although many
retainers of ‘Mamoutchek’, governor of Khurasan, were killed (during the action), he

63 Russko-indiiskie otnosheniya, 155. Akhmedov, /storiya, 194, claims that ‘Abbas II asked
Aurangzib to help against Balkh in 1665 and that Aurangzib refused, but he gives no source to
confirm this. See Du Mans, 307, for a letter from Isfahan of 18 November 1665 announcing
forthcoming hostilities between the Persians and the Uzbegs. It was thought, however, that there
would be little loss of blood, as the ‘Usbegs’ preferred a quick raid to a battle where ‘on les
cherche ou ...on les attend’. Chardin, Le couronnement, 347-8.
64 Kaempfer, 29. Chardin in Le Couronnement, 4-5.

65 Wali Quli, 47b. Luft, 151. Kaempfer (29) and Chardin (Le Couronnement, 4-5) give the Islamic
date for his death as 26 Rabi‘ although they also insist that this was 25 September, which can
only be correct if the Islamic date was 25 Rabi'‘l.
66 Chardin, Le couronnement, 349.

67 Krest'yanskaya

voina, IV, 12.

286

1651-81

did not mention any of these losses in his report to the Shah. The Shah therefore
believed that an Iranian victory had taken place and rewarded him for his bravery. But
when the truth became known Mamoutchek was sent into exile and he remained there
until 1674.8 Chardin's story is as follows. After Anusha attacked Marw in 1667 the
governor of Shirwan and Shaikh ‘Ali Khan (Shikhal Khan?) were despatched against
the “Yus-beks’ (Khwarazmians and Bukharans?) with 4,000 men. At the same time a

convoy of 200 men was sent from Qandahar with money for the Khurasan troops but
the “Yus-beks (Bukharans)’ attacked the convoy,® overcoming the small escort with

little difficulty and taking everything.7°
Meanwhile the new Shah's excesses with women and wine ruined his health, and
his extravagance ruined the country. His constant ill health, and the remarkable
combination of famine, severe earthquakes and foreign attacks which had afflicted
Iran since his accession, finally led to a suggestion that some evil influence was at
work. His doctor, who was unable to cure him, suggested that the astrologers had
chosen the wrong date for the beginning of the reign, a suggestion which was eagerly
taken up by his own supporters and by those of the young Shah. New calculations
were accordingly made and the auspicious date of 19 Shawwal 1079/22 March 1669
was chosen for a second coronation, after which Safi II started what he hoped would

be a glorious reign as Sulaiman I.7!
While this was happening in Iran the Siberian Bukharan Seitkul Ablin was sent to
China as the Tsar's official envoy. He left Moscow for Tobol'sk in March 1666,
together with a fellow Tobol'sk Bukharan, Seidyak Kulmametov (Sadiq Quli
Muhammad?). He bought ermines and ox hides on his way to Tobol'sk, as
instructed, and arrived there in early June 1666, but did not leave the town for over
two years. This was partly because it took the local officials a long time to collect the
furs and other items which he was to sell in China, and partly because he waited for a
Khoshout mission to arrive in order to obtain the necessary guides for his journey to
Ablai's encampments. This proved to be far more complicated than anticipated. A
Khoshout envoy, Akbazar (Haqq Nazar), did reach Tobol'sk, but only in about
February 1668 and he did not come on behalf of Ablai, whom Seitkul Ablin had

visited several times before. He came on behalf of Ablai's son Chagan, who had been
left in charge of the Khoshout tribe while his father was on pilgrimage in Tibet. An
introduction to Chagan was therefore essential for Ablin, who intended to spend the
winter with the Khoshout and who hoped to obtain carts from them for the remainder
of his journey. But he was unlikely to obtain an introduction if Akbazar was refused
access

to Moscow.

Unfortunately

the Tobol'sk

voevoda,

P.I. Godunov,

was

reluctant to let Akbazar go to the capital without specific instructions from the Tsar.
Ablin's efforts on Akbazar's behalf failed until a letter from the Tsar arrived in which
he demanded Ablin's immediate despatch to China. Faced with Tsar Aleksei's
incontrovertible command Godunov at last agreed to Ablin's suggestions. He sent
68 Tavernier, Les six voyages, (1712), livre troisiéme, 633-4.
69 Because of the area in which the attack took place it seems fairly clear that the “Yus-beks’ in
question must have been Bukharans.
70 Chardin, Le couronnement, 350-2.

71 Rabino di Bogormale. Chardin, Le couronnement, 375, 384, gives the slightly different date of
20 March (1079/1669) for the beginning of Sulaiman's reign. Kaempfer, 42, who was not in Iran
at the time, also gives the accession date as 20 March 1668, but adds that the Islamic year was
1079 (1669). CH.JIran, V1, 305-6 places his accession on 20 March 1668. Tavernier, Les six
voyages, (1712), livre troisitme, 584, gives no date for Sulaiman's accession.

287

‘Abd al- ‘Aziz

Akbazar to Moscow and kept back three members of his suite. The men were then

attached to Ablin as guides, and Ablin left Tobol'sk on 24 July 1668.”
Apart from the three Qalmagq thus borrowed,
suite, of whom the majority - a mixed bunch of
constituted his escort, the remaining four being
supervise his trading activities. It is not clear

there were another 30 men in Ablin's
Lithuanians, Muscovites and Tatars sworn officials who had been sent to
whether Kulmametov continued to

China with Ablin, but one of the officials who accompanied him was, like him, a

Siberian Bukharan. This time Ablin was not given a letter for the Emperor, for his
mission was purely commercial and he was expected to sell 4,539 roubles’ worth of
Treasury goods in China.
When he arrived in Beijing in June 1669, together with an ambassador from Ablai
who joined him during his journey, he was warmly received. Although he brought no
official letter, Ablin even had an audience with the Emperor. K'ang Tsi, who seemed
to be no more than twenty years old, asked about the Tsar's and Ablin's health,
graciously accepted the Tsar's gifts, and invited Ablin and his suite to dine in his
presence. During the meal the Emperor had choice morsels from his table sent to
Ablin, and before dismissing the Bukharan expatriate to a spacious stone hostel
reserved for ambassadors only, he gave him permission to trade freely in the capital.
Although Ablin did not see the Emperor again, he dined three more times at the
Imperial palace. He left some seven weeks later, delighted with the success of his
mission, for he had made a huge profit for the Tsar, later assessed as two to three
hundred per cent of the value of the goods taken.
It was a long time, however, before Ablin could report on his success to the Tsar
and deliver the presents, together with the goods purchased in China. His return
journey was very lengthy and took well over two years, due to internecine wars
among the Qalmaq. First he was told that Ablai had been attacked by other Qalmaq
and that he had lost many of his followers, whereupon he stopped in his tracks. He
set off again when the Sungar Senga wrote to assure him that the way was clear but
shortly afterwards he heard that Senga himself had been killed in battle. He stopped
again, this time for several months, resuming his journey after Galdan, Senga's
brother and successor, invited him to proceed. He then made his way to Galdan's
encampment, spent some time with him, and arrived in Tobol'sk with Galdan's
envoys in October 1671. Ablin then made his way to Moscow where he appears to
have arrived in early February 1672. No doubt Tsar Aleksei was pleased with the
financial success of his mission, as well as its diplomatic success. Whereas Baikov
had not even been admitted to the Celestial Court, the gifts sent with Ablin had been
accepted with due honour. K'ang Tsi had sent presents, as well as a friendly oral
message to the Tsar. Furthermore he invited Tsar Aleksei to send ambassadors and
traders to China, promising to grant them ‘food, protection and freedom to trade as
previously with profit’. The Tsar was not pleased, however, by a request for the
return of 170 Chinese nationals who had given up their allegiance to the Emperor and
had since begun to pay tribute to Moscow. He accordingly chose to ignore this
request, and consequently the question of these Chinese nationals, i.e., Gantimur and
his followers, became a bone of contention between the two countries which was
settled only in 1689.73

While Ablin was representing the Tsar's interests in Beijing, other ambassadors
72 13 July OS.
73 Russko-kitaiskie otnosheniya, I, 252-60, 262-7, 282, 288-97, 318-9.

288

1651-81

were representing the interests of Bukhara in India and Iran. In 1667 ‘Abd al-‘Aziz at
last sent Mustafa Khan Khafi back to Aurangzib. Although, according to Hajji Mir,
the Mughal envoy left in the company of two ambassadors from the khanate, Rustam
Bi from Bukhara and Khushi Bi from Balkh, the three men seem to have arrived

separately. Thus, in the account by Aurangzib's official biographer, Munshi
Muhammad Kazim, Rustam Bi is said to have arrived on 12 Dhi al-hijja/5 June 1667
and Khushi Bi's arrival is dated 4 Muharram 1078/26 June, i.e, three weeks later. No
details are given of the ‘precious’ gifts and ‘rarities’ which they delivered to
Aurangzib, but Munshi Muhammad notes that Tarbiyyat Khan was sent out of town
to welcome the Bukharan envoy and to bring him to Court.”4 And since Tarbiyyat
Khan was a former ambassador to the khanate, who had also represented Aurangzib
in Iran in 1666, the choice of such a personage was bound to please Rustam Bi and
his master. ‘Abd al-‘Aziz, who was himself on bad terms with Iran, would also have

been pleased to hear, on his ambassador's return, that Aurangzib's relations with the
Safawids had recently deteriorated. This was due to an extremely unpleasant letter
from the late ‘Abbas II which Tarbiyyat Khan had recently brought back from Iran. In
this letter ‘Abbas II expressed strong disapproval of the Mughal ambassador's
behaviour, which, he declared, showed complete ignorance of the rules of etiquette.
He also condemned Aurangzib's treatment of his father and brothers in the strongest
terms. Finally, although he offered to help the Emperor out of his internal difficulties
(possibly his problems with the Afghans and with Shivaji), the offer was very
offensive because he made it clear that he considered Aurangzib unable to cope with a
situation which required courage and determination, instead of stratagems and

treachery.’5 The unpleasantness of Shah ‘Abbas's letter, which had apparently
increased with each one of its five drafts, probably arose from anger at Aurangzib's
demand for the town of Qandahar in 1665,76 but he also objected to the increasing
repressiveness of the Emperor's religious policy from which the Shi‘a of India were
said to be suffering. This anger was compounded with contempt for the Mughals
because of their failure to retake Qandahar by force.
The tone of this letter, and the distastetul revelation that the Shah had caused his
ambassador's beard to be forcibly shaved off, after upbraiding him for serving ‘a
tyrant who (had) conquered nothing except through murder and betrayal’, can only
have increased Aurangzib's determination to keep on good terms with the khanate.
Rustam Bi and Khushi Bi were therefore treated splendidly. Each of them was given
a belt or shield, a bejewelled dagger, an aigrette, a sword and an elephant, together
with a generous sum of money and a horse with gold accoutrements. The difference
in their respective masters' standing, however, was carefully preserved, a sum of

200,000 rupees being spent on Rustam Bi and his suite, and only 150,000 rupees on
Khishi Bi and his retinue, although as a further token of his regard for their masters
Aurangzib allowed both ambassadors to leave India within four months. They were
dismissed together in October 1667, and they probably travelled back with an envoy
from Anusha of Khwarazm who was dismissed at the same time. It is interesting to
note, however, that the Khwarazmian

was given minor presents and was only

received at Court once, whereas Rustam Bi saw the Emperor three times. Clearly
74 Hajji Mir, 279a. Munshi Muhammad, II, 1049-50. Saqi, 62, says both men were received in
audience on 25 Dhi ’1-qa‘da/19 May 1667, after which they were sent back to the khanate.
75 Riazul Islam,

A Calendar, I, 448-51. See Tavernier, Les six voyage, Il, 263-5, for Aurangzib's

reaction to this letter and to his ambassador's offensive treatment in Iran.
76 As reported by the Muscovite ambassador Narbekov. Russko-indiiskie otnosheniya, 155.

289

‘Abd al-‘Aziz
Aurangzib had a higher opinion of ‘Abd al-‘Aziz's importance.”7
‘Abd al-‘Aziz was greatly encouraged by Aurangzib's friendliness. And it may be
that the Bukharan attack on Herat of 1668, mentioned earlier in connection with

Shikhal Khan, was partly due to his belief that such an attack would please the
Emperor, as well as Anusha. However, ‘Abd al-‘Aziz became concerned when
Anusha went on to undertake several further campaigns against Iran that same year
and also in 1669. According to an English factor in Surat who wrote in November
1668, during the first of these campaigns ‘The Eusbeugues or Tartars...surprised and
possessed themselves of Massendron (Mazandaran) and Astarabad’, which he
describes as ‘two large towns with their territoryes’. By January 1669 further damage
had been caused by Anusha, the factor reporting that the ‘Cossacke and
Eusbeagues...have done great mischief in Massendron and Guylan (Gilan)’. The
Muscovite envoy Fedot'ev who was in Khiva between June and September 1669 was

told that Anusha had attacked Astarabad and Karashar,’® killing many and taking
prisoners, in order to punish the Shah for “discontinuing the payment of his yearly
tribute’, this being an ex gratia payment made by ‘Abbas II to Abi ’1-Ghazi which
had ceased on his death seven years earlier.7? Shah Sulaiman had since sent large
numbers of troops to Mashhad and ‘Strabat’, and Anusha was then ‘in great fear’ for

he thought ‘that the Persian Shah intended to march and make war upon him’ .8°
‘Abd al-‘Aziz , who thought erroneously that Sulaiman I might be as energetic a
warrior as ‘Abbas II, hurried to dissociate himself from Anusha's action. He sent the
qush begi Hasan to Isfahan, where he had already been some 22 years earlier, with a
letter in which the new Shah was congratulated on his auspicious accession and
offered ‘Abd al-‘Aziz's friendship. “Abd al-‘Aziz also suggested that caravans be
allowed free passage through both their countries, and that they enter into an
agreement to help each other against their enemies. The Shah was only too pleased to
receive such a friendly message for he had had major problems since his accession,
not only with Anusha, but also with the governor of Qandahar who had turned
against him, and with Stenka Razin's Cossacks who had taken Baku and had attacked
Derbent and Gilan. Sulaiman I therefore sent back the qish begi Hasan with an envoy
of his own, Mehdi Khan, who delivered a message of ‘peace and reconciliation’
.®!
That same year Bukharo-Muscovite relations were at last resumed with five
embassies - two from Bukhara, two from Tobol'sk and one from Moscow. The
reasons for this resumption of relations were complex. On the one hand the timing
seemed auspicious, for ‘Abd al-‘Aziz was on good terms with his brother, and also
with Anusha and the Qalmagq. On the other hand, in view of the stringent new trade
regulations issued by the Tsar in 1667 (the Novotorgovyi ustav of 1667) which
affected Bukharan traders, and, through them, his own Customs takings, ‘Abd al‘Aziz may have thought it necessary to establish good relations with the Tsar. The
Novotorgovyi ustav was aimed at filling Tsar Aleksei's Treasury, which was depleted
77 Munshi Mubammad, II, 1049-50, 1051, 1063. Saqi, 62, only says that Rustam Bi and Khiashi Bi
were received in audience on 25 Dhi ’1-qa‘da/19 May 1667 and sent back to the khanate.

78 No town with a similar name has been found in the area.
79 Chardin, Le Couronnement, 340-5, explains that after Aba ’1-Ghazi returned to Khwarazm, out of

affection for him, ‘Abbas II continued to give him the pension of 1,500 timan which he had
received while living in captivity in Iran. In return Abi ’1-Ghazi promised not to attack Iran and to

prevent the rulers of the khanate from doing so.

80 English factories, 1668-9, 44n., 210. TsSGADA, fond 134, op.1, 1668 no.1, listy 30-31.
81 Hajji Mir, 279a-81b. Krest'yanskaya voina, IV, 12. Istoriya Azerbaijana, 279.

290

1651-81

as the result of his numerous, lengthy wars. It debarred all foreigners from retail trade
and from trade at the numerous Muscovite fairs. It also forbade them to sell their

goods to other foreigners or to out-of-town Muscovites, and laid down that all trade
dues were to be paid in gold or silver, and not in kind, as in the past. Since the
Muscovite Treasury only accepted foreign coins at a fraction of their real value, the
new requirement for cash payment was a particularly heavy burden for merchants. At
the same time a new and rather higher level of transit dues was exacted from
foreigners wishing to trade outside Astrakhan. Although some Bukharans might have
been happy to limit their trading activities to Astrakhan, where they paid far less on
their transactions, here too their freedom of action was curtailed. They now paid dues
even on their unsold merchandise and when they did sell, they could no longer
receive silver and gold. Instead they had to acquire local goods in exchange for their

own.82

“Abd al-‘Aziz's first ambassador to Muscovy, Nazar Muhammad, was sent on the
overland route to Astrakhan early in 1669. Nazar Muhammad apparently took the
Tsar a generous assortment of gifts worth 200,000 roubles, but he was robbed on the
Yaik river, and later in the town of Yaitsk. On the Yaik the hapless ambassador was
caught up in a battle between two groups of Qalmaq whose chiefs, the Khoshout
Ablai and the Torgout Daichin, had so far been friendly towards Bukhara. In Yaitsk
he was robbed of his remaining 13 camels loaded with goods but it could not be
established whether his assailants were Stenka Razin's formidable Cossacks, or else

Muscovites who recognised the Tsar's authority. Despite his ambassador's
unpleasant experience and its possible implications, ‘Abd al-‘Aziz was not
discouraged. He despatched another mission to Muscovy, his only concession arising
from the attack on Nazar Muhammad being to instruct the new ambassador, Mulla
Farrukh, to travel via Siberia, rather than Astrakhan.®? This, of course, lengthened

his journey considerably and, as he arrived in Moscow long after his Muscovite
counterparts reached Bukhara, his mission will be described after theirs.

The Muscovite missions of 1669 were not only quicker, but also more successful
than the Bukharan ones, in that all of them reached their destination. Thus the
Cossack Oleshka (Aleshka) Shaposhnikov, who was sent off from Tobol'sk, visited
the Qazaq Tauka Khan, then spent two months in Bukhara and was back in Tobol'sk
in late October 1669 in the company of Mulla Farrukh. Onufrei Fedorov, who was
also despatched from Tobol'sk, stayed about 18 months in Bukhara, made contact
with the Muscovite captives of the khanate and brought back a petition from them for

the Tsar.84 Nothing else is known about either of these missions, but a full and very
valuable report has survived from the embassy of the two half-brothers who set off
from Moscow on 11 July 1669, or about two months before Mulla Farrukh set off
from Bukhara. The elder brother, Boris Pazukhin, was in charge of the mission, and
the younger brother, Semen Pazukhin, was only his assistant, a difference in rank
which soon became known in the khanate and which affected the way in which each
82 p.s.Z., I, 657-63. Bazilevich, "Novotorgovyi ustav", 589-90, 612-3. Klyuchevskii, Skazan’iya,
307. For a Bohemian

silver coin (efimok) worth half a rouble, or 100 den'gi, the Muscovite

autorities gave only 36 den'gi. Smirnov, "Ekonomicheskaya politika", 405. Coins which had
been worth 40-42 kopecks were re-minted and then given a value of 64-100 kopecks. See further
about the Novotorgovyi ustav in Chapter 14 below.

83 Materialy, 220. See Russko-kitaiskie

otnosheniya, 262, for a letter of Ablai's son, Chagan, in

late February 1668 stating that they were on good terms with ‘Abd al-* Aziz.

84 TsGADA, fond 214, op.3, st.623, listy 259, 276-7.
291

‘Abd al-‘Aziz
of them was treated during their stay.
According to the letter from Tsar Aleksei which they delivered to “Abd al-‘Aziz,
the aims of the mission were threefold: to establish friendly relations between the two
countries, to secure the free movement of traders and to obtain the return of the
Muscovite nationals who were living as slaves in the khanate. There were other
reasons too, which the Tsar spelled out in his instructions to the Pazukhins. He
wanted to obtain up-to-date information on the area. This meant that they were
expected to find out who was the then ruler of “Yurgench’ and what sort of relations
he, and the rulers of Bukhara and Balkh, had with the Sultan and with the rulers of
Iran, India and Georgia. The ambassadors were also to ascertain whether the three
Central Asian rulers intended to be friendly or hostile towards Muscovy in the future.
They were expected to report on the relative strength of the armed forces at the
disposal of the three Central Asian rulers and to obtain reliable information ‘from
many sources’ as to the best routes to India. Finally they were to persuade the silk
producers of the khanate to sell their silk in Astrakhan.
Thus it would seem that, as well as trade, and the return of his subjects, security
was the main consideration behind the despatch of this mission. The Tsar hoped to
bolster his economy by establishing a direct and profitable trade route to India. He
needed the merchants of the khanate to keep on coming to Muscovy, so that his
Treasury could benefit from the new scale of Customs dues introduced in 1667.
Although he had given an Armenian company the exclusive right to import Iranian
silk into Muscovy and to re-export it from there to the European market, Tsar Aleksei
did not wish to discourage Bukharans from bringing silk over. On the contrary, he
probably realised that competition would help to keep the price of silk at a reasonable
level. And he hoped to gain the maximum profit from their interest in the German
broadcloth available in Muscovy. Following Krijanich's advice of 1663, he intended
to place this commodity exclusively in the hands of his agents, so that they could sell
it to Bukharans at the highest possible price. He also wanted to buy raw cotton from
Bukharan merchants, process it and resell it at a profit to Germany, together with
Bukharan raw silk and silk goods.85
At the same time the Tsar was anxious that Bukhara should not support his
traditional enemy, Turkey, in their next clash. He therefore needed advance warning
about ‘Abd al-‘Aziz's possible intentions, as well as reliable information about the
khan's armed forces in case he should prove hostile. As for the Muscovite captives
held in Bukhara, Tsar Aleksei wanted them back for they would be useful in the wars

against Sweden which his capable minister, Ordyn-Nashchokin, was planning,
having brought to an end the war with Poland and having acquired half of Ukraine for

his master.86
The Pazukhins and their party made slow progress on their way to Bukhara. It
took them over three months to get to Astrakhan and nearly a year to reach Khiva.
When they reached Astrakhan on 21 September 1669 they were told that the Caspian
was dangerous in the autumn and that they must wait for a Qalmaq escort to come and
take them overland to the Yaik. When this escort at last arrived in March 1670 they set
off, with considerably less money than expected, and highly dissatisfied with their
treatment at the hands of the local voevoda, Prozorovskii. He had given them half the

85 Krijanich, Russkoe gosudarstvo, 9, 15. Sobranie uzakoneniya, I, 865-7.
86 Pares, 215. Riasanovsky,

199-200. Dukes, 38, however, insists that the Treaty of Andrusovo

with Poland was only an armistice agreement.

292

1651-81

quantity of walrus tusks which they were to use as cash, on the grounds that the
remainder had earlier been exchanged for various goods required by the Tsar, and he
had categorically refused to make up the difference with other items. Worse still the
tusks fetched less than a sixth of the usual price, so that the Pazukhins started off with
a distinct disadvantage. Fortunately they had other resources to draw upon, for they
had been given a wide variety of items in Moscow which they could either sell, if
needed, or else distribute as pominki. These ranged from furs to mirrors, the furs
consisting of 19 times 40 sables,87 3 ermine coats, 8 squirrel coats and even 2 worn
sable caftans. There were

also 35 dresslengths,

10 of which were

of woollen

broadcloth, 224 hides, 18 lamps, a box, a casket, 208 kg of walrus tusks, and no less

than 2,768 mirrors.88

The Pazukhins' overland journey, which led them through the Torgout
encampments and took two months, proceeded without difficulty. In late May 1670
the party and their Qalmaq escort arrived in Khwarazm, where they were treated with
courtesy and with due ceremony. Officials were sent to meet them four miles outside
Khiva. They rested there two days and nights, sleeping in one of Anusha's own
travelling tents, then a reception committee of 100 took them into Khiva on horses
whose accoutrements were chased with silver. In Khiva they were given the khan's
former house to live in and had a first audience after only three days. Anusha, who
some months earlier had written to the Tsar, suggesting the renewal of their relations,

politely rose, as expected, on hearing the Tsar's name.®9 Later he invited them to dine
at his table, and during the meal Boris Pazukhin noticed that the recent Bukharan
ambassador to Muscovy, Nazar Muhammad, was sitting nearby, for Anusha was
then on good terms with ‘Abd al-‘Aziz whom he was helping to fight Subhan Quli.
During their second audience the matter of the Muscovites held in Khwarazm was
discussed, at which stage Anusha, whose behaviour so far had been irreproachable,
made difficulties. Although professing himself ready in the future to allow all
ransomed slaves or free Muscovites to cross Khwarazm without delay or ransom

(sic), he insisted that none who had worked off their bondage, either locally or
anywhere else, were available at the time. The only slaves in the country belonged to
his subjects who had bought them at great expense to work for them. He added that
the Tsar was free to ransom them if he chose to do so, but when Pazukhin asked for
them to be sent to Astrakhan where they would be paid for, Anusha said this was
impossible because his country would come to a standstill without their labour. In any
case they might escape on their way to Astrakhan and not be paid for, which would
reflect badly on his honour, as well as his purse. Furthermore it was against
precedent for him to release them before they were duly ransomed. Pazukhin argued
that this would not constitute a precedent and that if Anusha agreed to do so he would
obtain the Tsar's friendship, but Anusha objected that to send them to Muscovy
would mean a great expenditure in food and transport, which he would never recover.
Pazukhin then said that he would get instructions from the Tsar, and suggested that in
the meantime Anusha should forbid his subjects to own, acquire or sell Muscovite
slaves. He added that if the Khwarazmian ruler waived all ransom requirements for
the slaves held in Khwarazm and let them all leave the country, he would surely gain
the Tsar's friendship, whereupon Anusha declared that he would release ‘as many as

87 Kurts, "Sochinenie", 267, says a furcoat consisted of two and a half times 40 sables.

88 "Nakaz", 33-6, 75.

89 Thid., 36-40. Materialy, 210. Anusha's letter to the Tsar is thought to have been written in
November 1669.

293

‘Abd al-‘Aziz
possible’ on the departure of his next ambassador to Muscovy and also on Boris
Pazukhin's return from Bukhara. He also promised to forbid the ownership or
purchase of Muscovite slaves during such time as he was exchanging embassies with
the Tsar. This was quite a significant achievement and, satisfied that he could extract
no further concessions from the Khwarazmian ruler, Boris Pazukhin left for the
khanate on 14 June 1670, a fortnight after his arrival in Khiva. Food and transport for
his party were provided up to the frontier, six days away and across the Amu-Darya,
and the Muscovites continued from there to Qarakil through a waterless waste.”
They were treated with equal consideration and courtesy in the khanate. As soon
as the authorities were advised of their arrival they sent out an escort and food. Four
and a half miles outside Bukhara officials came to meet them and delivered a message
from the town governor. He apologised for not being able to organise a grand
welcome for them, because the khan's troops and major officials were at Qarshi with
‘Abd al-‘Aziz. However, he managed to get together a party of 200 men who escorted
the Muscovites on the last two miles of their journey, settling them in the capital on 4
July, in a large carpetted house which was put aside for their use.
At this stage the Muscovites made difficulties with regard to their subsistence
allowance. Boris Pazukhin objected to the initial delivery of food, saying that it was
insufficient, and that in any case he had been well provided for by the Tsar. But he
was told that he must accept all of it, i.e., 72 lb of rice, 40 loaves, 5 lb of onion, 5

pints of cornflower oil, and the 36 lb each of grapes, apples and melons, as it was
traditional for traders to supply ambassadors with food during the first three days of
their stay. Then on 9 July Pazukhin was sent a lump sum to cover his needs and those
of his suite of eight for the following 8 days, which was based on a daily money
allowance of nearly 4 roubles. This was far more money than Bukharan ambassadors
ever received in Muscovy.?! Nevertheless Pazukhin told the official who delivered it
that the allowance was ‘petty and disgraceful’! Perhaps he thought that more than that
was spent by the Tsar on the large quantities of drink which he provided for foreign
ambassadors and their suites. The official answered mildly that there was no
precedent governing the amount of money to be delivered and that he would seek
further instructions from the khan. And the meekness of his response apparently
satisfied Pazukhin's pride, for he at once changed his mind and accepted the

money.92
It was six months before Pazukhin had his first audience with ‘Abd al-‘Aziz, for

the khan was away from the capital fighting Subhan Quli. This time ‘Abd al-‘Aziz
appears to have been responsible for the outbreak of the hostilities, for in early 1670
he had seized the town of Hisar Shadman which, according to Hajji Mir, was ‘one of

the dependencies of Balkh’. Naturally enough Subhan Quli demanded it back, and
when he failed to obtain satisfaction he marched with a large army and retook the
town. Then ‘Abd al-‘Aziz sent troops to the area and, according to Pazukhin and to
Qipchaq Khan, he called upon Anusha to help him subdue Subhan Quli. Hajji Mir
does not mention

Anusha's

agreement

with

‘Abd al-‘Aziz,

but says that the

Khwarazmian ruler marched to Aqcha, destroying several nearby villages, on 6 Rajab
1081/19 November

1670. Then when Subhan Quli marched against him, Anusha

90 "Nakaz", 40-44.
91 If the rate given to Kuzai Nughai or Mulla Farrukh had applied, this allowance would have been
less than 2 roubles, plus drinks.

92 "Nakaz", 44-7. See A.I., IV, 43-44, for the allowances generally given to foreign ambassadors and
envoys in Astrakhan in the seventeenth century.

294

1651-81

ravaged the countryside around Balkh and fled back to Khwarazm. This is not agreed
by Pazukhin who agrees that Anusha destroyed several villages and encampments in
the province of Balkh, but insists that Anusha's armies remained ‘around the Darya
for one and a half years’ afterwards, and that they were still camping there in

September 1671.93

‘Abd al-‘Aziz was back in Bukhara on 9 January 1671. Despite his absence from
the capital he had shown a keen interest in the welfare of his Muscovite visitors. In
late July he had sent from Qarshi to enquire about Boris Pazukhin's health and had
made arrangements for 215 roubles, a substantial amount at the time, to be given to
the ambassador for his party's needs. His messenger told Boris not to be despondent
(because he was unable to see the khan). He would not be detained when he was
ready to leave. And in the meantime ‘Abd al-‘Aziz had sent permission for the
ambassador and his suite to go for walks in his private gardens and also to travel
freely outside Bukhara.
On 11 January 1671, or only two days after he returned to Bukhara, ‘Abd al‘Aziz granted the Pazukhin brothers their first audience. He took unusual pains to
please the ambassadors. He even had a horse sent for Boris to ride on his way to the
audience, although this was strictly against precedent, and this horse, Boris noted
with pleasure, was a valuable stallion worth 25 roubles. During the audience the khan
allowed Boris to hand the Tsar's letter (gramota) directly to him, although the custom
at his Court was for the diwanbegi to handle an ambassador's letter. Furthermore
“Abd al-‘Aziz showed commendable respect for the Tsar by half-rising to take the
gramota from the dais on which he was sitting in style, surrounded by some 100
dignitaries. Later he had the ambassador and his party seated quite near to him, on the
very same dais, and questioned them with interest about their journey.
A second audience took place a week later, and on this occasion Boris delivered
the Tsar's gifts. These were 8 sables, 5 times 40 sables, 2 coatlengths of ermine and
1 of squirrel, 8 lengths of watered silk, 4 of woollen cloth and 3 of satin, 7 hides, 2
large lamps, 2 lb of beaver unguent, 41 lb of walrus tusks, and a water container.
Although these gifts were varied and generous, “Abd al-‘Aziz does not seem to have
been greatly impressed. This was because he preferred gerfalcons. During the
audience the asked whether the Tsar had gerfalcons and falcons, then he had one of
his own gerfalcons brought to him. He exclaimed that he liked these hunting-birds
most of all and that he would like the Tsar to send him as many as possible, to which
Pazukhin at once replied that in future gerfalcons would always be sent to him. Later
the khan asked which was the best and quickest route between Astrakhan and
Bukhara, and on being told that this was the sea route to Karagan and that the

Turkmen constituted a serious threat for travellers between Karagan and Khiva, he
offered to write and ask Anusha to control them.
Two weeks later the Muscovite party was invited to dine with the khan. The meal
proceeded with much ceremony, the khan sitting on his dais surrounded by guards
holding staffs and muskets. Pazukhin noted that the tablecloth was of gold brocade
and that the dishes and plates in front of the khan were all made of gold. Vegetables,
berries and sweetmeats were served first, in 15 dishes, then the cloth was changed
and 17 dishes containing a variety of meats were placed on it. During the lengthy
proceedings verses from the Qur’an were read for over an hour, then music was

93 Hajji Mir, 283b-4a, 287b-8a. "Nakaz", 60. Qipchaq, 277a, places Anusha's attack several months
later, at the end of 1081/9 May 1671.

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‘Abd al- ‘Aziz

played and sung by nine musicians, after which a strange animal, which seems to
have been a rhinoceros, was brought in and shown off to the ambassador who was
asked if there were any such animals in his country. Unwilling to admit that there
were none, Pazukhin replied that although he himself had not seen any, such animals
might well exist in Muscovy. He was then asked where the walrus tusk came from
and explained that it was found in Arkhangel'sk and in other northern towns
belonging to the Tsar. At this stage milk was served to all the Bukharan officials and
dignitaries, and after they had drunk the khan's health from large wooden tankards

the meal came to an end.”
During his stay Pazukhin had many meetings with ‘Abd al-‘Aziz's advisers, and
in particular with the influential khwajahs of the khanate in order to try and secure the
release of the Muscovite captives. He was told that the khan would agree to this but
not until he had made peace with his brother, and until the various Qalmaq groups had
stopped fighting. ‘Abd al-‘Aziz was true to his word, but it was not until 1 October
1671 that he felt able to send nine Muscovites to Boris Pazukhin for him to take to

Muscovy.?> By then the Torgout Qalmaq leaders Ayuka and Monchak had crushed
the Khoshout Ablai whom they had despatched to Muscovy as a captive, and ‘Abd al‘Aziz had twice exchanged ambassadors with Subhan Quli.9© The khan made it clear
that he was sending the released Muscovites to the Tsar in the hope of securing his
friendship. At the same time he gave permission for Pazukhin to take back all the
freed slaves who had come to Bukhara from other lands. Finally he promised to
release many more when, and not before, another Muscovite ambassador visited the
khanate and his own ambassador returned from Muscovy.
The Pazukhins' third and last audience took place on 31 October 1671. Once
again ‘Abd al-‘Aziz showed pleasing respect for the Tsar, half-rising from his seat
when mentioning his name. He asked them to tell the Tsar in answer to his letter that
he wished for consultation and friendship ‘for ever’, he wanted to exchange
ambassadors and traders, and he would ensure that there were no more Muscovite
slaves in his country in the future. He made it clear that he had sent as many slaves
back as possible with Pazukhin, having ransomed them himself, and he repeated that
he would release others with the next ambassador to come over from Muscovy.?’ For
the time being, however, he would send no further presents to the Tsar, for he had
not heard from his ambassador Mulla Farrukh, nor did he know whether the gifts

delivered by Mulla Farrukh had pleased the Tsar,98 but he would despatch an
ambassador to accompany the Pazukhins and
Pazukhin then asked for a written answer to
promised to get this ready, but suggested that
return from a campaign on the eastern frontiers

their party back to Muscovy. Boris
Tsar Aleksei's letter. ‘Abd al-‘Aziz
the Muscovite party wait for him to
of the khanate. When the Pazukhins

94 Thid., 47-51, 76, 51-53.
95 Thid., 54, 56-57.
96 No exact date for Ablai's discomfiture and despatch to Muscovy is given in Ocherki istorii

Kalmytskoi ASSR, 128, 138, or in Demidova's Pervye russkie diplomaty, 150. N.B. Monchak
and Ayuka were Daichin's sons. Nefed'ev, 21. According to Qipchaq Khan (277a), however,
Subhan Quli ‘rebelled’ again shortly after the return of ‘Abd al-‘Aziz's (second) ambassador from
Balkh, which Hajji Mir (284b-Sa) places on 16 Jumada II/20 October.

97 On this occasion ‘Abd al-‘Aziz did not think it necessary to explain that other captives would only
be released against ransom.

98 Tbid., 65-66. Here Mulla Farrukh is said to have left for Muscovy in the year 176 or before
September 1668, but the letter which he brought from 'Abd al-'Aziz was dated 1669. TsGADA,
fond 109, op.1, 1669-75 kn.1, list 23a; fond 214, op.3, st. 623, listy 275.

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1651-81

declined, the khan readily agreed that they might leave for Muscovy during his
absence, although he was not willing to send his ambassador to Moscow until after
the campaign had come to a successful conclusion. And the very same day ‘Abd al‘Aziz set off towards Turkestan to investigate the unexpected arrival of the khan of
Bashkiria, Kuchuk, in an area of Qaraqalpaq settlement.
The embassy had been a success. Boris Pazukhin had seen the khan five times
and dined with him three times.9? He was taking back generous gifts, a number of
captives and much information for the Tsar. He and his brother had each received a
caftan made of gold brocade, a knife chased with gold and a horse, Boris's gifts
being naturally more valuable, since he was the senior member of the party. Each
person in his suite had been given a robe and a sash. They were taking back not only
the nine captives given to Pazukhin by the khan, but also another 22 whom the
ambassador ransomed at prices varying between 2 and 45 roubles, the majority
costing well under 40 roubles, i.e. less than their original purchase price.!° The Tsar
would no doubt be pleased to hear that fifteen of these ransomed captives were
soldiers, and therefore of special value to him.
During his stay Boris Pazukhin had gathered much information on the khanate.
He reported in detail on Subhan Quli's relations with his brother and with Khiva, and
was able to assure the Tsar that Bukhara had no relations with either Turkey or
Georgia, both of whom were too far for ‘either friendship or hostility’. He found out
that Anusha was on good terms with India, but at loggerheads with the Shah whose
territories he had raided repeatedly and who was preparing to retaliate. Only the field
of Bukharo-Indian relations seems to have escaped his scrutiny. With regard to the
armies of the khanate and Khwarazm he was able to give very precise figures of
150,000 men for Bukhara, 75,000 for Balkh and 30,000 for Khwarazm. He had a

poor opinion of the armies of Bukhara and Balkh. They were not trained, they had no
infantry and only about one third of each would be effective in the field. As for their
artillery, it only consisted of small cannons mounted on camels. The best cavalry
elements in the Bukharan army were Qazaqs and Qaraqalpags, he said, but only half
of them would agree to take up arms at any one time, for fear of leaving their
encampments unprotected, and thus at the mercy of a Qalmaq attack. The Balkh army,
on the other hand, had some Qalmag, as well as Turkmen and Qataghan tribesmen,
among its reliable elements. Pazukhin also reported on the agriculture of Bukhara and
Balkh, saying that there was little corn, and that the necessary irrigation was solely

carried out by captives and slaves. !01
In accordance with his instructions Pazukhin had made detailed enquiries about
the route to India and had also tried to persuade Bukharans to sell their silk in
Muscovy. He established a precise itinerary for the journey from Astrakhan to
Janabad/Delhi via Balkh which,!02 he was informed, took 18 weeks, the stretch from

Balkh taking between 8 and 12 weeks. He found out that the route through Iran was
not only longer, more difficult and dangerous, but also closed to foreign ambassadors
because of the poor state of relations between Iran and India. On the other hand
Subhan Quli was ready to help foster the Tsar's relations with India. Although
Pazukhin had not been able to meet Subhan Quli himself, the route being unsafe

99 "Nakaz", 66-67, 50, 51, 55, 65.
100 Thid., 55, 78-79, 58. Muscovite captives were generally purchased from Khivan merchants at 40

to 50 roubles per person.

101 "Nakaz", 60-61.

102 CHI, IV, 205-6. Delhi became Shahjahanabad in about 1659.
ok

‘Abd al-‘Aziz

because of the continuing hostilities between Balkh and Bukhara, he had sent his
interpreter Mikita to Balkh on a secret mission. And Mikita had returned in early June
1671 saying that the ruler of Balkh wanted the Tsar's friendship and would help his
envoys to reach India. Subhan Quli's advisers and officials were equally keen to
foster good relations as well as trade, and they had written to Pazukhin to promise
their co-operation.
With regard to silk, Pazukhin reported that there was sufficient raw silk, but not
enough manufactured silk in the khanate for export purposes. In Khwarazm,
sufficient manufactured

silk was

available, but it was purchased by Bukharan

merchants and did not get to Muscovy. However, Anusha taxed producers in kind,
taking only the very best quality of boiled silk, and his officials promised to sell this
exclusively to the Tsar's agents.103
As soon as the Pazukhins received ‘Abd al-‘Aziz's letter for the Tsar which was
sent to them from the eastern provinces, they made their final arrangements. Hearing
that Anusha intended to arrest them in retaliation for the robbery of his ambassador
Pehlewan Quli by Stenka Razin, they decided to avoid Khwarazm and return via Iran.
They accordingly obtained a laisser-passer from ‘Abd al-‘Aziz to the governor of
Marw and set off on 28 November 1671. After-waiting three months outside Marw
for permission to proceed, they continued to Mashhad where they arrived in late
March 1672, and went on to Shamakhi, with guides and laisser-passers provided by
the authorities. But, despite orders from Sulaiman I that they were to be exempted
from all taxes, Iranian tax-farmers in Talyshi forced them to pay Customs and trade
dues by beating two members of their party ‘until they were half-dead’.!04 On
arriving at Lyangur (Lenkoran) they decided therefore not to continue overland, but
took a boat to Baku. From Baku they went inland to Shamakhi and then northwards
to the harbour of Nizovaya on the Caspian which they reached in October 1672, only
to find that no boats were available to take them to Moscow. And by the time the
busa, which arrived on 19 November, was ready to leave the weather was too bad for
them to attempt the return journey. They were obliged therefore to winter by the
Nizovaya harbour, having to borrow money for their needs. During their stay they
were practically besieged by men who said they were acting on orders from the ruler
of Dagestan and who submitted them to ‘all kinds of taxes, robberies (and) insults’,
chasing, beating, kidnapping members of the party and even shooting arrows at them
whenever possible. When the Caspian was open to navigation in the spring, although
they were anxious to leave the area as soon as possible, the ambassadors waited
patiently and conscienciously for the busa to fill with merchants and goods which
‘would bring profit to the Tsar’. They finally set sail for Muscovy on 22 June 1673
and they were back in Astrakhan on 10 July 1673, more than 3 years after leaving this
town on their way to the khanate.105
While the Pazukhins were travelling to and from the khanate, a number of
ambassadors from Bukhara and Balkh arrived in India, Muscovy and Iran. In 1669
Subhan Quli sent two ambassadors to Aurangzib, possibly hoping for support in his
next round of fighting with ‘Abd al-‘Aziz. The first was Mir Shihab al-Din, who
reached Delhi on 18 Dhu ’1-qa‘da/19 April, a mere courier, or ferestada, about whom
Musta‘idd Khan's account is rather confused. He begins by saying that the envoy

103"Nakaz", 62-65, 68-69.
104 Talyshi has not been identified.

105 See Materialy, 211-4, 416-7 for Pehlewan Quli's adventures and stay in Muscovy. "Nakaz", 6768, 70-74.
:

298

1651-81

hailed from Bukhara, but later explains that Shihab al-Din had to obtain Subhan
Quli's (not ‘Abd al-‘Aziz's) permission before emigrating to India some months later.
He adds that the envoy was given two horses by the Emperor, but it seems much
more likely that it was Shihab al-Din who brought two horses from Balkh as a gift for
Aurangzib.
Subhan Quli's second envoy, Shadman Khwajah, arrived in November 1669. He
was a fully-fledged ambassador or safir. He was introduced at Court by two major
officials, delivered greetings from his master and was given a robe and 10,000
rupees. There is no record of the presents which he may have brought for the
Emperor, but it is known that he was richly rewarded when he left in late February
1670. He was presented with 25,000 rupees, a bejewelled sword worth 5,000
rupees, an elephant with a silver saddle, a flowered shawl and an outfit consisting of
a robe, turban and valuable sash. A further 10,000 rupees was distributed among his

suite. He was also given a very large number of robes to take back,!© a fairly clear
indication that they were intended for sale and that his mission was mainly
commercial.
Aurangzib was then trying to force the Hindus under his rule to convert by
making their lot increasingly difficult and this policy had begun to cause him serious
problems. In 1665 he had made them pay twice the usual rate in Customs dues, two
years later he had decreed that Muslims would be exempted from such payments
altogether. In 1668 Hindu religious fairs were proscribed, then in April 1669 he
issued orders for all Hindu schools and temples to be destroyed. The result was a
major revolt which broke out in 1669 some 50 miles from Agra. Early the following
year Shivaji rebelled again in the Deccan, retaking forts which he had earlier ceded to

the Mughals and plundering their territory, as well as Surat.!°7 In the circumstances,
and since Aurangzib's relations with Iran, as noted by Pazukhin, were less than
cordial, the Emperor thought it worthwhile to strengthen his relations with Subhan
Quli, a fellow-Muslim of whose orthodoxy there could be no doubt.
He therefore despatched an envoy to Balkh about three months after Shadman
Khwajah's departure. His ambassador, Yaka Taz Khan, was elevated to a higher rank
for the occasion and was supplied with 100 gold coins, a horse and an elephant
valued at 4,000 rupees, together with a rich outfit which included a bejewelled sword,
dagger and aigrette, and which was meant to reflect, both his own dignity and that of
his master. He took more than 200,000 rupees’ worth of gifts to Subhan Quli, in
addition to 5 valuable Arabian horses, and made remarkably slow progress.198
Indeed, by the time he reached Balkh in May 1671 he had been travelling for over a

year. Two reasons can be advanced for this: either he was unable to go faster because
he was riding an elephant, or else he stopped on the way, thinking it unsafe to go on
while Subhan Quli was fighting the combined forces of ‘Abd al-“Aziz and Anusha. In
any case Subhan Quli was delighted to receive a friendly letter and an ambassador
from Aurangzib. According to Hajji Mir, he treated the envoy regally and gave him a
precious robe, a horse and a valuable knife. But he made no attempt to dismiss him,

keeping him over 4 years in Balkh, during which time Balkh was twice again at war
106 Saqi, 82, 91, 90, 97. Shadman Khwajah was given 105 robes (tab), not cannons (tap) as in

Sarkar's translation of this work on page 61.

107 CHI, IV, 241-3, 258-9.
108 Saqi, 104. According to Nawwab Samsam (III, 968-71) Yaka Taz Khan was the son of Nadir

Muhammad's former ambassador to India, Mansur Hajji.

299

‘Abd al-‘Aziz

with Bukhara.
!09

While Yaka Taz Khan was making his way towards Balkh, three envoys from the
khanate arrived in India, Iran and Moscow. Little is known about the stay of “Abd al‘Aziz's envoy, Muhammad Sharif, who reached the Mughal Court in February 1671,

except that he was generously rewarded with 25,000 rupees, a horse with gold
accoutrements and a robe.!!0 But the attitude of the authorities towards the envoy
from ‘Usbecia’ who arrived in Iran in 1670 gave rise to a comical incident, which is
reported at length by Kaempfer. According to Kaempfer's informants the envoy
refused to take his allowance on a monthly basis, as was usual. He asked for it to be
given to him as a lump sum when he was ready to leave. The authorities, however,
did not like the idea of parting with so much money at once, so, with Shah
Sulaiman's permission, the Treasury had special coins minted which contained only
one quarter of the usual amount of silver. The coins were given to the envoy, but he
realised that he had been cheated and managed to dispose of them by purchasing large
quantities of cloth of gold and silver which he took back to the khanate. The faulty
coins were eventually returned to the Shah's Treasury and the Shah was forced to
have them taken out of circulation. Whether or not he made a loss as a result, no
doubt he was disappointed that his attempt at saying money had been foiled, and had
probably caused damage to his relations with the khanate.!!1
The Bukharan envoy who arrived in Moscow to a warm reception in 1671 was
Mulla Farrukh. He had been on his way since 1669 and it had taken him over a year
to get to Moscow from Tobol'sk. This was not due to any ill-will on the part of the
authorities. On the contrary, the voevoda of Tobol'sk had wanted to send him on to
Moscow shortly after his arrival there, but he had asked to stay because he had sent a
man to fetch the gifts (intended for the Tsar) which he had inadvertently left behind at

the encampment of the Qazaq Tauka.!!2 When his man eventually returned, he was
empty-handed because he had failed to get through the Qalmaq encampments, the
various chiefs being at war with each other. By then the winter route to Moscow was
no longer available and, as the summer route was impractical because of the many
rivers and muddy roads on the way, Mulla Farrukh had been forced to wait until the
following winter to continue his journey.
When on 11 December 1670 Mulla Farrukh left Tobol'sk for Moscow with an

escort of nine,!!3 he found that his allowance of food and drink was far less than
what was considered the norm in Astrakhan. This may have been because the
province of Siberia was poorer, but he only received 38 den'gi per day to cover his
food and that of his 18 men, instead of something over 123 den'gi. Although the
drinks allowance of his men was more in line with the usual daily rations, he himself
only got 3 charki (0.63 pints) of wine instead of 4 charki, with an eighth of a vedro
(2.62 pints) of mead and a quarter of a vedro (5.25 pints) of beer, instead of half a
vedro of each.
The discrepancy, however, was put right as soon as the party reached Moscow on
7 February 1671, and their food allowance went up by 100%. Mulla Farrukh's own
allowance was equal to that supplied to Kuzai Nughai, whose precedent was carefully
studied for this purpose by the authorities. The ambassador's son was treated exactly

109 Hajji Mir, 305a. Saqi, 149.
110 Thid., 108.
111 Kaempfer, 52-53.

112 Here called Tyavka.
113 TsGADA, 109, op.1, 1669-75 kn.1, listy 1b-6, 9-9b.

300

1651-81

like Kuzai Nughai's brother, and his interpreter had a slighly better allowance than the
ordinary members of the party. As for the thirteen officials in his suite, they were at
first treated no better than his servants, but Mulla Farrukh soon had this mistake
rectified, for he too knew all the particulars of Kuzai Nughai's visit. Later he obtained
an allowance for the three extra servants whom he had acquired in the capital, and
throughout his stay he was provided with 4 den'gi's worth of candles per day, either
two or four weekly cartloads of logs and a watercart. He was also allocated two

cleaners for his quarters and a guard of 5 strel'tsy.114
Mulla Farrukh's audience took place a week after his arrival. On that day a
generous quantity of food was delivered, which included beef, live sheep and hens,
but no ducks or grouse. The ceremonial observed during the audience was identical to
that observed in the case of Kuzai Nughai, the only difference being that a sledge was
sent for him instead of horses, because the audience took place in winter. In the letter
which Mulla Farrukh delivered from him, ‘Abd al-‘Aziz asked for loving relations to

be resumed, and for ambassadors to be exchanged. He also said that the Tsar would

find much in the khanate that could be of use to him.!!5 Mulla Farrukh delivered a
great variety of gifts for the Tsar, which would later be valued at over 491 roubles.
These pominki were of three main types. The first included a large number of items
useful in war or hunting: - 27 Bukharan bows, a silk-embroidered quiver and
gauntlets, 2 sabres, 7 sabre blades, a Qalmaq saddle chased with silver and 9
Bukharan steel knives. Secondly there were wild animals - 5 beavers and 4 snow-

leopards -116 and furs, namely fox and sheepskin pelts. Thirdly there was a variety of
cotton and hempen materials made in Balkh, Bukhara, Arabia and China.!17
After the audience Mulla Farrukh received another generous gift of food and drink
similar to the one given before the audience, and which included grouse. As in the
case of Kuzai Nughai an increased allowance in food and drink followed the
ambassador's visit to the Tsar, and Mulla Farrukh made quite sure that this increase
was paid up in full. Ten days after his arrival he complained to the authorities about
the non-delivery of 2 cartloads of logs and also about a delivery of sour mead, and his
complaints were speedily and obligingly dealt with. He also asked to be given money
instead of beer, and this too was readily agreed upon.
However, although he had been well looked after in Moscow, Mulla Farrukh was

anxious to get back to the khanate, perhaps because he knew that the khan would be
worrying about his fate, and that of his pominki. Less than a month after arriving in
Moscow, on Ist March 1671, he therefore asked to be dismissed via Siberia without

delay, and such was the Tsar's determination to oblige him, that the administrative
wheels were made to turn with unusual speed.!18 Within eight days of his request
Mulla Farrukh's pominki had been valued and he had been given the Tsar's presents
for ‘Abd al-‘Aziz which consisted of 8 bundles of 40 sable pelts worth 700 roubles,
or 50% more than the khan's presents. The question of gifts for the ambassador and
his suite had been carefully considered and, after referring to three previous
precedents, it had been decided to reward them on the same scale as Adam Bik and
his retinue in 1619. In the event, however, due to a shortage of money and silver,
neither could be given to them. Instead of a silver beaker and a coat worth 40 roubles,

114
115
116
117
118

Tpid., listy 10-14, 15b, 16b, 27b-28a, 50-Sla, 7a, 14b.
Tpid., listy 15b-16, 17a-20a, 21b-23a.
It is not clear whether they were alive or dead.
TsGADA, 109, op.1, 1669-75 kn.1, 20b, 28b-29a, 34b.
Thid., listy 23b-24b, 25a-b, 26b-28a, 29b-30a.
301

‘Abd al-‘Aziz
as presented to Adam Bik, Mulla Farrukh received a sable coatlength worth 50

roubles, and arrangements were made to give him 10 arshin (just over 7 metres) of
either ‘satin or damask’. His son was given 48 den'gi's worth of damask, plus 3
roubles' worth of sables and London cloth. His interpreter was presented with a
crimson cloth and a pair of sables, and each of the others received a pair of sables of

carefully graded value.!!9 Having thus dealt with the twin issues of pominki and

parting-gifts, the authorities then arranged a full programme for the remainder of
Mulla Farrukh's stay. During the next ten days he had two interviews and a farewell
audience, and he was also invited to watch the Shrovetide procession.
Mulla Farrukh's interviews took place on 10th and 13th March 1671. In the first
he was closely questioned by two secretaries of the Duma. In the second he was
interviewed by the Tsar's influential friend and adviser, Artamon Sergeevich
Matveev, who was the head of the Foreign Department. The ambassador answered all
the questions fully, but his first two answers must have been misleading, for he was
recorded as saying that ‘Abd al-‘Aziz ‘had become king at his father's death’, and that
Nadir Muhammad had followed ‘his brothers (sic) Abdallah Khan and Mam (Imam)
Quli’ on the throne! His interviewers were also told that it took 40 days to travel from
Bukhara to Tobol'sk, and only 17 from Bukhara to India, India being described as a
country full of valuable goods and precious stones. He listed the goods available in

Buhara as ‘kindyak, zenden' and kitaika’,!2° and readily admitted that only small
quantities of silk, damask or satin, of an ‘ordinary’ quality, could be obtained there.
In contrast saltpetre was good and plentiful, and also far better than the Iranian
variety. It cost under a rouble for about 25 kg whereas raw silk cost 2 roubles,
apparently for the same quantity.!2! Mulla Farrukh also revealed that his ruler had
many wild beasts, such as lions, snow-leopards and other animals whose names he
did not know in Russian, and he explained that he had not brought many gifts to Tsar
Aleksei because it was feared that the Qalmaq might rob him on the way.!22
In his second interview Mulla Farrukh was questioned more closely and was also
asked to expand on his master's letter. He explained that “Abd al-‘Aziz had not sent
envoys earlier because of the Qalmaq wars, which had made it difficult to use the
most convenient route, that through Tobol'sk. He said that it would take 4 months to
reach Aurangzib's seat of Delhi from Tobol'sk, and he made a determined effort to
promote the khanate as a centre for trade. He gave a longer list of the goods that could
be purchased there, mentioning brocade, this time without any reservations. He

quoted the cost of smelting Bukharan saltpetre as 10 den'gi per pud (16.38 kg).!23
And he insisted that raw silk was very cheap in the khanate, although it turned out that
2 roubles would only purchase one pud (16.38 kg) and not 1.5 puds (24.5 kg) as

implied earlier. The new items on his list included rubies,!4 silver ore and lead from
the khanate, as well as precious stones, pearls, and ‘all kinds of richly ornamented
goods’ from India.
Mulla Farrukh then volunteered a list of Muscovite goods wanted in the khanate

119 Thid., listy 34b-40a.
120 Various types of cottons fully described in chapter 10 below.

121 The price quoted was 25 altyn (150 Muscovite den'gi) for a batman weighing 1.5 pud (24.5
kgs). According to Davidovich (Materialy po metrologii, 87), the ambassador had in mind the

batman of 25.6 kg equal to 5,000 mithgal weighing 5 gr each.

122 TsGADA, 109, op.1, 1669-75 kn.1, listy 31b-33a.

123 Thid., 54b.

124 Or more probably spinels of Badakhshan.

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among which he included both valuable items such as ‘good’ sables, black fox and
walrus tusks, and items which were inexpensive in Muscovy such as woollen cloth
(unspecified) and ermine pelts. Realising from Matveev's question about the methods
used for mining and extracting silver and saltpetre in the khanate, that the Muscovites
were particularly interested in such goods, Mulla Farrukh lost no time in making
capital out of it. He assured the boyar that when the friendship between ‘Abd al-‘Aziz
and the Tsar “increased and became stronger’, the khan would be prepared to send as
pominki whatever the Tsar might want. Matveev at once took this up, suggesting that
if the khan freed all the former Muscovite slaves living in the khanate, he would get
“twice as much friendship’ from the Tsar. Mulla Farrukh promised to pass on the
suggestion “at once’, for he knew that the khan was keen on the Tsar's friendship and
would no doubt be happy to release those who wanted to go back to Muscovy.
However, he did not think that the former slaves would wish to leave, for many of

them had major official posts and lived at Court, as the khan's close advisers.
The interview closed after Mulla Farrukh had answered searching questions about
the khan's pastimes, the size of his bodyguard, the weapons used by this bodyguard,
and the towns in the khanate. He gave the khan's favourite pastime as hunting
wolves, wild boars, beavers and other wild beasts. He said that there was always a
bodyguard of between 3,000 and 4,000 men at Court, who fought mainly with spears
and bows although they did have a few guns, and he explained that Bukharan towns

had no suburbs.125
Mulla Farrukh's farewell audience with the Tsar proceeded in a similar way to his
first audience. He was given a very cordial letter for ‘Abd al-‘Aziz in which Tsar
Aleksei expressed his readiness to have diplomatic and trade relations with the khan.
In order to attract Bukharan traders to the country, he announced that, in his frontier
towns, they would be allowed to trade for either money or goods. Although a similar

concession had been granted to Khwarazmian traders the previous year,!2° this
concession was bound to be appreciated in the khanate, for it was totally against the
spirit of the Novotorgovyi ustav of 1667 to allow money to leave the country. It
showed goodwill and would certainly appeal to those Bukharans who did not want to
trade inland or in Moscow, where, presumably, the prohibition on cash sales to
foreigners, introduced in 1667, would still hold good. The Tsar went on to ask for
the release of Muscovite captives, but he limited his request to those captives who had
worked off their bondage either in the khanate or in other lands. No doubt the Tsar
had in mind the need to increase his armed forces in preparation for an impending
conflict with Turkey which may be why his very moderate request was couched in
such a courteous style. There was no hint of complaint about the men's illegal
detention and the Tsar would have been confident that his request was bound to be
granted. ‘Abd al-‘Aziz was also promised Tsar Aleksei's ‘love and friendship’ if it
was granted, and he was told that eight bundles of 40 sables were being sent to him,
both in token of thanks for his gifts, and as a ‘reward’ (zhalovan'e).!27 Nothing was
said about the other Muscovite slaves held in the khanate, and the letter closed with a

hint that Mulla Farrukh had been specially favoured, for it was mentioned that he had
been permitted to trade freely and that orders had been given for him to be sent back

125 TsGADA, 109, op.1, 1669-75 kn.1, listy 51b-56a.
126 TsGADA, fond 134, op.2, 1668 no.25.
127 The fact that Tsar Aleksei used the word zhalovan’e is rather surprising for it might have been
resented by the khan, as it meant salary, or reward, and implied that “Abd al-‘Aziz was considered
by him as a vassal rather than a fellow monarch.

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‘Abd al-‘Aziz

without delay.!28
‘Abd al-‘Aziz would certainly have been pleased to receive this letter and to hear
how well his envoy had been treated in Muscovy. Unfortunately Mulla Farrukh never
completed his return journey to Bukhara. He left Moscow on 19 March 1671 to
travel, once again, via Siberia. He was provided with an escort of five men and with
the same food and drink allowance as on his way to Moscow, but that he should have
set off on the day appointed by the Tsar was little short of a miracle, for the official
carriers (yamshchiki) of Yaroslavl' refused to provide the carts required. Their
refusal may well have been due to religious prejudice or to xenophobia, for the carts
were to be used by Mullah Farrukh and also by the Qalmaq ambassador. The carriers
had clearly set their hearts against him, for they even threatened to kill Mulla
Farrukh's escort rather than let the party stay at the official lodgings provided in their
town. The Moscow officials acted energetically and swiftly, knowing that the Tsar
did not want the ambassador to be delayed. Rather than report the carters and wait
until they were forced to obey orders, they requisitioned carts from the famous
monasteries of Spasskii and Troitsk, south-east of Moscow, and sent Mulla Farrukh

on his way.!29
When Mulla Farrukh arrived in Tobol'sk on 23 May with the Qalmaq envoy and
also with a group of serving-men returning to Siberia, he was told that he could leave
for Bukhara by whatever route he chose. Once again, however, he refused to leave in
a hurry. Afraid of Qalmaq in-fighting on the way, he decided to wait for the next
caravan from Bukhara in order to travel back with a group of merchants. The
Tobol'sk voevoda, Ivan Borisovich Repnin, agreed to let him stay but warned that the
food allowance would be discontinued from then’on, as it would have been an
unnecessary burden for the Tsar's Treasury. This did not alter Mulla Farrukh's
decision. He chose to remain in Tobol'sk and did so for several months, but during
this time he fell seriously ill and he eventually died there on 15 September 1671.

His son was then asked whether he wished to leave with the Bukharan caravan,
as planned, but this offer was withdrawn after his pominki were checked and were
found to include one more bundle of sables than the seven entered on his official list.
This was reported to the Tsar and the young man was detained under guard awaiting
further instructions. The Tsar's answer took nearly a year to arrive but the voevoda
finally received his instructions in June 1672. He was told to send the young man off
without delay with his “700 roubles' worth of sables’. The Tsar did not deign to
explain that there had been a mistake in the official list, in which eight bundles ought
to have been entered. Shocked by the idea of adding instructions to the effect that the
list had to be disregarded, which might be a dangerous precedent, Repnin took it
upon himself to exact Customs dues on the khan's and the ambassador's goods
before sending the young man on his way, an irregularity which would be taken up
by the next Bukharan ambassador to visit Muscovy.
By the time Mulla Farrukh's son left Tobol'sk the Volga region was safe again for
travellers. The upheaval caused by Stenka Razin's rebellion, which had raged there
between 1669 and 1671, was well and truly over. In view of this the young man
elected to take a rather more circuitous route back to the khanate. Rather than make for
Turkestan and Tashkent, he went across to Kazan' and from there to Astrakhan, in

order to avoid the Qalmaq encampments altogether. But after paying Customs and

128 TsGADA, 109, op.1, 1669-75 kn.1, listy 40b-46b
129 Tbid., 56b-66a. The obstreporous official carriers were later publicly beaten on the Tsar's orders.

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1651-81

transit dues on his goods in Astrakhan, he vanished without trace. Neither he, nor the
Tsar's letter and gifts, nor the goods purchased for ‘Abd al-‘Aziz, a very large and
miscellaneous selection ranging from knives and padlocks to buttons and walrus

tusks, and including furs of all types and gold coins, ever reached the khanate.130

The early 1670s saw a brief spell of peace in the khanate. Subhan Quli took
advantage of his friendly relations with ‘Abd al-‘Aziz to ask him for help, in October
1671, when one of the leaders of the Qunghrat tribe raided the province of Balkh. His
brother sent over two major officials and troops, but within a year, in 1083/1672-3,
Subhan Quli had rebelled again and was calling upon Anusha of Khiva to help him

against ‘Abd al-‘Aziz.!3! Although no details of this conflict are known, it must have
been well and truly over by the time the next Bukharan ambassador, Hajji Farrukh,
was sent to Tobol'sk in June 1674. For he assured Artamon Matveev in Moscow that
the three monarchs were living at peace and ‘in consultation’ with each other, ‘Abd al‘Aziz having married Anusha's daughter and having given his own daughter in
marriage to Anusha. Unfortunately Anusha, like his father, had taken a liking to the
rich spoils to be found in the khanate. He came back before 27 March 1675 and
raided Chahar Jay which belonged to his erstwhile ally. However, he does not appear
to have caused much damage on this occasion and he soon left the province after
Subhan Quli sent one of his parwanchi to deal with him.132
Meanwhile in December 1673 some “‘Uzbeg’ ambassadors arrived in Istanbul.
Whether they came from Bukhara or from Khiva, and this is not clear for they are
merely described as ‘Uzbegs’, they did little to enhance the reputation of their ruler.
They were suspected of theft when a crate of the gifts which they had brought over,
and which had allegedly disappeared, was found empty in their lodgings. As a result
of this incident they were refused an audience, and they presumably had to leave
without seeing Mehmet IV.133
In 1674 Subhan Quli made a fresh attempt to strengthen his relations with Iran
with the despatch of an ambassador. When this ambassador met the French traveller
and jeweller, Chardin, he at once tried to barter some of his rhubarb and lapis lazuli
for Chardin's jewels. They could not agree a price, however, so he invited the
Frenchman to go to Balkh with him, promising that he would be well treated and
would get a good price for his jewels from Subhan Quli. On hearing of this invitation
Chardin's Iranian friends insisted that he must not accept, because of the shortage of
food, the dirty habits and the ill-treatment of non-Muslims in Balkh. They also told
him that a party of Armenian merchants had been killed there despite a safe-conduct
from Subhan Quli, and Chardin refused the ambassador's invitation. He paid a visit
to his lodgings, however, and later wrote disapprovingly that there was rubbish
everywhere, including the remains of animals butchered at the very doors of the
ambassador's appartments.The resulting stench, says Chardin, compounded with the
smell of garlic, assafoetida and strong herbs, which they used for cooking, made
him feel sick. He concluded his unflattering description by saying “En un mot, ils
130 Jpid., listy 68a-71b, 108b, 120a-5b. Mulla Farrukh's son had not reached Bukhara by the late
spring of 1674, when the next Bukharan ambassador left the khanate on his way to Muscovy.

131 Yajji Mir, 285a-6a. Qipchaq Khan, 277a.
132 TsGADA, fond 109, op.1, 1669-75 kn.1, list 113a. Chardin, Le couronnement, 345, says that
(either before or in) 1665 Anusha married a sister of Subhan Quli's and sent his sister to marry

the ruler of Bukhara. Qipchag Khan, 277a.
133 Hammer, Geschichte, III, 667. The date given here (January 1644) is an obvious error, and
should be read as 1674.

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‘Abd al-‘Aziz

sont encore pires que les Moscovites’, Muscovites having a very bad name for
manners in Iran, where they were generally regarded with as much contempt as the

hated ‘Yus-beks’.134
That same year ‘Abd al-‘Aziz sent envoys to India and to Muscovy. His envoy to

India was a certain Uzbeg/Urang Khwajah, of whom it is only known that he was

dismissed in Dha ’1-hijja/March 1675 with a rich robe, a bejewelled aigrette, a female

elephant and 10,000 rupees.!35 Far more is known about Hajji Farrukh who was sent
to Muscovy. He was a former Muscovite subject who had been kidnapped by the
Qalmaq when a child of eight. He had grown up as a slave in the khanate, and by
1674 he described himself as a ‘colonel’ at the head of a regiment of 1,000 gunners.
He travelled via Yamysh lake to Tobol'sk, taking over three months en route and

arriving in Tobol'sk on 4 October 1674. He left for Moscow on 26 January 1675,
very displeased with his treatment at the hands of the local voevoda, P.M. Saltykov.
He had received a total allowance of 20 den'gi, together with 5 charki (1.05 pints) of
wine and half a vedro (10.5 pints) of beer to cover the. daily needs of his party of 17,

and this was far less than even Mulla Farrukh had been given.!36 Worse still, when
Saltykov and his colleagues at last sent him on to Moscow after keeping him nearly 4
months in Tobol'sk, they only provided him with five carts, so that he was forced to
leave behind eight of his men, as well as the two Muscovites whom he had ransomed
to give to the Tsar.
Hajji Farrukh brought over official goods as well as goods of his own. There is
no record of the items sent by the khan, but the ambassador's goods were carefully

listed and taxed by the Customs officials of Tobol'sk.137 Although these were mainly
inexpensive items, large quantities were carried. They-included 310 lengths of various
cottons, 160 lengths of a cotton and hemp mixture, 163 kg of raw cotton, 20 goat
hides and 120 sashes of unbleached cotton. Hajji Farrukh also brought gifts from
“Abd al-‘Aziz for the Tsar, but they did not compare in number or in value with those
delivered by Mulla Farrukh four years earlier. They consisted solely of 9 Bukharan
bows and 9 beavers, valued by Tsar Aleksei's agents at 22.5 roubles, and they cannot
have pleased him as much as Hajji Farrukh's own gifts of two ransomed Muscovites
and 9 porcelain cups. Hajji Farrukh tried to explain his master's apparent
niggardliness by saying that it only stemmed from ‘Abd al-‘Aziz's fear that his envoy
might be attacked en route. But it was soon clear that this was not the full explanation,
for he went on to say that if he were promptly dismissed, the khan would send a
much grander assortment, which he then described in detail. First he mentioned live
offerings - an elephant, 2 lynxes, 2 black monkeys, 40 amblers, a horse which ran 20
times faster than an ordinary horse, 2 talking finches, 2 parrots, and two Arab boys.
Then he listed articles decorated with gold and precious stones, such as a dagger, a
sash, 9 knives, 9 sabres, 9 saddles, 9 drums, 18 bows, and 36 of the khan's own

bows, 9 and multiples of 9 being considered auspicious. And finally he described a
number of miscellaneous objects which included hides and lengths of materials, as
well as 3 large tents, 27 rubies (spinels) of Badakhshan, 5 Ib of dye, 9 sheepskins
134 Chardin, Voyages, Il, 121.

135 Sagi, 141. If this was the same Uzbeg Khwajah who had been entrusted with missions to India
in 1623 and 1640, he would have been very elderly.

136 TsGADA, fond 109, op.1, 1669-75 kn.1, listy 114b-5a, 9b. The 18 men in Mulla Farrukh’'s

suite had had to share 38 den'gi with him and had received a total of 3.78 pints of wine and 47.2
pints of beer per day. Barsukov, 238.
137 He was charged dvatstaya, i.e. 5 per cent in dues.

306

1651-81

and 40 gauntlets.
!38
Hajji Farrukh arrived in Moscow on 12 March 1675 and was seen by the Tsar the
very next day. At his audience he delivered a letter in which ‘Abd al-‘Aziz gave three
main reasons for the embassy, namely, to increase their mutual friendship, to bring
back Mulla Farrukh's possessions, or whatever remained of them, to the khanate, and

to obtain gerfalcons and other items needed by his Treasury.!39 When he addressed
the Tsar, Hajji Farrukh asked for Mulla Farrukh's possessions to be traced. He then
handed in a petition from the Muscovite captives to the Tsar, and finally he declared
himself ready to leave the very next day, if dismissed.
Two days later, the ambassador had a long interview with Artamon Matveev in
which he made much of ‘Abd al-‘Aziz's goodwill towards the Tsar. This was the
reason why, after Nazar Muhammad

had been robbed en route, ‘Abd al-‘Aziz had

sent a second ambassador without waiting for an embassy from the Tsar. This was
also why, even after Mulla Farrukh died and most of his goods were consfiscated by
officials in Tobol'sk, “Abd al-‘Aziz sent a third envoy to Moscow. When asked about
the Muscovite slaves held in the khanate, Hajji Farrukh said that there were 500 in his
regiment alone, and many more, and his master would release them all without
ransom for the sake of his friendship with the Tsar. In answer to a question about the
pominki which ‘Abd al-‘Aziz wished to receive, he gave these as gerfalcons, good
chiming clocks, with pendulums, weighing either 1.5 or 2 pud (24.5 or 33 kg), and
also cymbals. They should be sent with a clock mender and a cymbalist, who would
only be kept in the khanate during the stay of the Muscovite envoy, and who would
be expected to teach local people to mend clocks and to play the cymbals. Although
these were the pominki which would give his master most pleasure, ‘Abd al-‘Aziz
was also very much in need of a variety of Muscovite goods which the ambassador
listed, presumably in order of preference, as sables, cloth, mirrors, beavers, otters,

squirrel and hare pelts, ermine and coral buttons.14°
Hajji Farrukh then tried to promote the exchange of traders between the two
countries by pointing out the commercial advantages of the khanate. Muscovite
merchants would be able to barter their cloth and hides for damask, satin, rubies and

‘all manner of other valuable Indian goods’ including silver and gold, Kabul being
(only) 20 days from Bukhara. This prompted Matveev to disclose that the Tsar was
sending envoys to ‘Abd al-‘Aziz and to the Emperor of India. “Abd al-‘Aziz would be
receiving pominki worth 493 roubles and consisting of 5 bundles of 40 sables, plus 5
pairs of sables. Would this please the khan, he asked, and could Hajji Farrukh make
any suggestions as to the route which the Tsar's envoy to India should take from
Astrakhan? ‘Abd al-‘Aziz Khan, Hajji Farrukh answered, would be so delighted to
receive an envoy from the Tsar that he would at once send an envoy and rich gifts
back to the Tsar. But the Tsar's representative should travel overland with him to
Bukhara, and this would take 10 days to the Yaik, 8 days to the Emba and a further

20 days to Khiva. An escort of 100, half Muscovite and half Tatar, should be

138 TsGADA, fond 109, op.1, 1669-75 kn.1, listy 74b-75a, 110b, 73b, 114b, 75b-77b, 82b, 89b,
96a-97b, 109a. Khilkov, 458. Here a damask steel drum inlaid with black enamel is also

mentioned among the pominki sent by ‘Abd al-‘Aziz, but no reference to it has been found in the
manuscript sources.

139 TsGADA, fond 109, op.1, 1669-75 kn.1, listy 83b-85a.
140 Jpid., listy 90a-91a, 107b-9a, 110a-111a. Materialy, 454. The word korolek (pl. korol’ki) used

here by the ambassador is taken to mean coral buttons, this being its generally accepted
meaning, although the word could also apply to small gold ingots and to the white or mottled
fur of either sables or marten.

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‘Abd al-‘Aziz
provided as far as the Emba, he continued, beyond which the party could rely on
getting an escort from Khiva, for the khan of Khwarazm was on good terms with
‘Abd al-‘Aziz. Hajji Farrukh went on to assure Matveev that the Tsar's envoys to
India would have nothing to fear en route. They would receive all necessary help in
the khanate, Khwarazm and Balkh, for the three khans were living in ‘harmony and
consultation’. Having thus promised full co-operation to the Tsar's envoys, Hajji
Farrukh mentioned by way of comparison the recent plight of a number of Qalmaq
and Bukharans envoys and traders who were detained in Tobol'sk by the voevoda.
They had not been permitted to go on to Moscow, nor had the envoys received the
(usual) food allowance, and he asked for them to be allowed to continue to Moscow.
Satisfied that he had made his point about the behaviour of the Tsar's officials, he
returned briefly to the topic of the best route to India before introducing a request

from ‘Abd al-‘Aziz that all envoys be given free access to Moscow from Astrakhan
and Tobol'sk. This would prevent jealousy and unpleasantness, he explained, such as
was caused in Tobol'sk by certain (unnamed) Qalmaq envoys who had resented the
fact that he received permission to go to Moscow, when they did not. Hajji Farrukh
then he lodged a detailed complaint against the Tobol'sk voevoda, and the interview
came to a close.141
The ambassador whom Tsar Aleksei had decided to send to ‘Abd al-‘Aziz was a
former Armenian born in Iran, a colourful and controversial personality, about whom
much is known from his reports, as well as the numerous complaints which were
made against him and the biography which was compiled by one of his descendants.
Alimartsan Babaev (‘Ali Mardan b. Baba) had converted to the orthodox faith and fled
to Muscovy shortly after meeting Muscovite embassy personnel in Isfahan in 1653.
An intelligent and capable man, the Tsar's new subject, now called Vasilii Daudov,

had been very useful to the Muscovite authorities, especially when they dealt with
Armenians. His knowledge of languages had also led him to Turkey, first in the train
of ambassador Nesterovich in 1667, then as a fully-fledged ambassador in 1669 and
1672. On this occasion Daudov was accompanied by a Muscovite Muslim from
Astrakhan called Mamet Isup (Muhammad Yusuf) Kasimov, who was probably of
Central Asian origin and who was expected to continue to Delhi with a message for
the Emperor. Tsar Aleksei had been trying to establish direct contact with India ever
since 1646 in order to benefit from the rich Indian trade. But his attempts to send
envoys or traders there via Iran had failed, on one occasion because of ‘Abbas II's
strained relations with Aurangzib, and another time because ‘Abbas II had become
personally hostile towards him. Gribov's and Pazukhins' reports about the Bukharan
route to India, which had been confirmed by Mulla Farrukh, had made this a more
attractive alternative, and because ‘Abd al-‘Aziz was known to be well disposed
towards the Tsar, it was hoped that Kasimov would have no difficulties in the

khanate.!42
In order to flatter the khan and retain his goodwill, it was decided that the retinue
of the Tsar's envoy to Bukhara should be far larger than that of his envoy to Delhi.
Daudov was therefore given a suite of twenty-nine men and only four were sent to

accompany Kasimov.1!43
141 Thid., listy 111a-5a.
142 Daudov, 6-14. P.S.Z., I, 670. Kasimov lived in the Bukharan hostel in Astrakhan in 1667.
Malinovskii, 125-32, 137-9, 142-4.

143 TsGADA, fond 109, op.1, 1671-1676 kn.4, listy 321b-5b, 329b. Daudov, 15. Yuldashev, K

308

1651-81
Daudov had been entrusted with many tasks, one of which was to facilitate

Kasimov's mission to India. Another was to bring back as many Muscovite captives
as possible and to obtain a promise that no more Muscovites would be bought in
Bukhara, Balkh or Khiva. Although Tsar Aleksei hoped that ‘Abd al-‘Aziz would
keep his promise and free all the Muscovite slaves in the khanate, he took no chances.
Daudov was instructed to ‘work by all means’ to get them released, even if this meant
paying a small ransom for them. If ‘Abd al-‘Aziz went back on his promise and
refused to release the captives Daudov was to try and to see them secretly. He should
urge them to ‘remember the Christian religion’ and to exert themselves in order to
secure their release by their own endeavours. He should assure them that the Tsar
would be most gracious to them when they returned to Muscovy, and Daudov was
asked to compile a list of their names, ranks and origins, together with their
geographical locations and an estimate of their total numbers.
Trading considerations were also an important part of Daudov's mission. Tsar
Aleksei was keen to develop the Muscovite-Bukharan trade and to attract Bukharan
merchants to Muscovy. In his letter to the khan he therefore recalled the promise made
to Mulla Farrukh, that Bukharans might henceforth trade for either money or goods in
Muscovite frontier towns. As an additional inducement Daudov was instructed to tell
the khan's advisers that traders, as well as ambassadors, would be allowed to visit

Moscow, that all would be provided with carts, food and drink, and that none would
be delayed. Although this did not mean that the increased transit dues payable since
1667 in Muscovy would actually be waived, the provision of free transport and food

supplies would undoubtedly mitigate their effect.14
Further instructions related to items either produced or available in the khanate,
starting with silk. Tsar Aleksei wished to know the exact amount of (raw) silk to be

found in the khanate, as well as the price of each variety. In Moscow, he added, it
cost 20 roubles, if yellow, and twice as much if white, but he did not think it
necessary to explain what quantity he had in mind, because Daudov was bound to
know that this was the price per pud, as he was very much in touch with the trading
community. If Bukharan silk cost far less, Daudov should persuade local traders to
bring it to Muscovy. He was also expected to find out what goods from the khanate
would be ‘suitable in Moscow’, and to prevail upon the khan to send some to the
Tsar.!45 He was instructed to buy a ream of red glossy paper and 100 green hides for
the Tsar, as per samples provided, also a ream each of green, pale blue and yellow
spotted paper, all of which was said to be available in the khanate. Camels were also
on his shopping list, for the Tsar wished him to purchase two camels, ‘equipped after

the local fashion’, to take back to Moscow.!46
With regard to Bukharan saltpetre, Daudov was to find out whether it was indeed
better than the Iranian variety, in which case he was to persuade the khan to send a
good quantity as part of his pominki. He was also to make diligent enquiries about the
advantages of trading in saltpetre. Still on the subject of pominki, the Tsar carefully
listed a number of other items which he would be pleased to receive. These were

istorii, 99-100. Baikova, Rol’, 57, Russko-indiiskie otnosheniya, 194, 210, 223.
144 TsGADA, fond 109, op.1, 1671-1676 kn.4, listy 148-50b, 134b, 147a-b.
145 Tpid., listy 150b-1a. Kurts, "Sochinenie", 150, gives rather higher prices for plain silk in
Moscow in 1674, quoting 110-130 kopecks (220-260 den'gi) per Ib, ic. 44-52 roubles per pud.
Black silk, on the other hand, was much cheaper at 60 kopecks per Ib or 12 roubles per pud.
146 TsGADA, fond 109, op.1, 1671-1676 kn.4, listy 154b-Sa.

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‘Abd al-‘Aziz
silver, precious stones, ‘damask and other valuable goods’, spices, and also camels
complete with accoutrements. This list was expanded in a later memorandum to the
ambassador, which showed that the Tsar had not been impressed with the sort of gifts
which he had received from Bukhara so far, and that he expected to be amply repaid
for the expenses incurred in sending envoys to Bukhara, as well as looking after the
Bukharan embassies to Moscow. Thus he asked for gold to be sent as pominki with
the next Bukharan ambassador, explaining that what he meant by gold was something
between 10 to 20 puds (between 163.8kg and 327.6kg), no less! In future, he added,
he would expect the following pominki from the khan: - gold, damask, “golden satin
and other valuable goods’, as well as the very valuable gold brocade called zarbaft
which, according to Chardin, might cost 18 taman, i.e. between 2,250 and 2,572

tanga, or between 56 and 64 roubles, per piece. He stressed that he did not want ‘the
type (of goods) sent-before’ and he promised that, if he received the items in
question, he would send whatever the khan needed in return.!47
Tsar Aleksei also instructed Daudov to bring~back a wealth of up-to-date
information on various subjects, most of which had already been investigated by
previous Muscovite ambassadors. He required details of the khan's relations with
Turkey, Iran and India, the strength of the Bukharan and Yurgenchi army, the wealth
of their respective Treasuries, the best route to India, and the selection of Indian
goods available in the khanate. He even asked for the exact prices which Indian goods
fetched in Bukhara in order to decide whether Muscovite merchants could make a
profit by purchasing them there. Another subject of interest to Tsar Aleksei was the
Amu-Darya, its source, length, course, and the sort of people who lived on its banks.
A special section of the briefs issued to Daudov and to Kasimov related to
etiquette, behaviour and what might today be called propaganda. They were told to
remember that the Tsar's honour must be protected and his name ‘raised in honour’.
All questions about Tsar Aleksei's age were to be answered evasively in order to avert
the evil eye, and the following recital of his virtues was suggested: ‘he adorns the
throne with his example, his kindness, his courage, his wisdom...he is gracious to
all,...no one can see him and remain unhappy’. The ambassadors were also to make it
clear that all was ‘quiet in the land’, Stenka Razin and his followers having been
caught and executed, and all other rebels having ‘begged forgiveness for their
wickedness and become obedient once more’. Finally the Tsar warned Daudov and
Kasimov that they were not to quarrel, making it clear that they would be punished if
they did so. 148
The Tsar's ruling against quarrelsomeness is particularly interesting in view of the
fact that Daudov managed to alienate two Khivan ambassadors and nearly half his
fellow-travellers while executing his mission. This sort of warning not being
standard, at least in the case of ambassadors to the khanate, it can only be assumed
that Daudov and Kasimov had a history of quarrelsomeness which detracted from

their undoubted ability and devotion to duty. The former Armenian, whose brothers
147 Tbid., listy 151a-b, 166a. Chardin, Le Couronnement, 238. See Burton, Bukharan trade, 87,
for the value of the tanga as 1.4-1.6 shahi. There being 200 shahi in a taman, the price of a
piece of zarbaft would have been something between 2,250 and 2,572 tanga and since, according

to Mulla Farrukh 1 Bukharan ‘den'ga’ (tanga) equalled 5 Russian den'gi (not 10 as in Bukharan
trade 87, 88, the present author not having realised that Mulla Farrukh was using the kopeck as
a conventional word to mean “den'ga’, and not in its real value of 2 den'gi) this would have been
11,250 to 12,860 den'gi, or 56-64 roubles.

148 TsSGADA, fond 109, op.1, 1671-1676 kn.4, listy 153a-4b, 143a-4a, 145a-b, 158a.
310

1651-81

were merchants,!4? was certainly determined to make his fortune and that of his

family while serving the Tsar, and during his mission he often showed himself to be
grasping, self-seeking, harsh with his inferiors and lacking in tact, even vis-a-vis his
superiors.
In March 1675 he wrote to the Tsar with a list of general suggestions and also a
complaint about the pominki which he was to take on his forthcoming mission. His
suggestions were wide-ranging. He wished to take one interpreter and two translators
(tolmachi) with him, as well as a specified group of trampeters who would ‘help to
ransom the Muscovite slaves’, presumably by putting ‘Abd al-‘Aziz into a good mood
with their music! He was in favour of travelling via Iran, as food and carts could be
obtained there for the slaves who were to be ransomed. He also asked permission to

take hired carts with him, ‘because Boris Pazukhin had to hire carts everywhere’, the
implication being, presumably, that this would be cheaper to arrange in Muscovy.
With regard to the pominki, he objected that none had been provided for rulers
other than the khan of Bukhara and that he had only been given 500 roubles' worth of
sables. He compared this with the pominki given to Pazukhin and appended a detailed
list which showed that his predecessor had taken, not only sables to the value of 500
roubles, but also a varied assortment of goods worth 886 roubles, plus 776 roubles'
worth of walrus tusks and 20 pud (337 kg) of tobacco for the Qalmaq. Such precise
knowledge of the goods and presents taken by Pazukhin showed that Daudov was
making very thorough preparations for his own mission. Perhaps because this
seemed to augur well for the success of the embassy, Tsar Aleksei took no exception
to the tactless nature of Daudov's objections. On the contrary, although 20 pud of
walrus tusks and five gerfalcons had already been earmarked as additional pominki,
he at once acted upon Daudov's requests. He ordered three tolmachi and the required
trumpeters to be despatched with the ambassador. He instructed officials to purchase
goods similar to those sent with Pazukhin on Daudov's behalf. And after tobacco and
a number of rich materials, hides, mirrors, pelts and lamps had thus been added to
Daudov's consignment of pominki, Tsar Aleksei went on to write to Shah Sulaiman,
asking him to help the ambassador. Daudov must have been well satisfied with what
he had achieved.
At this stage, however, he made further requests which were calculated to
advance his own personal interest. He asked for his property to be guarded and for it
to be exempted from the usual tax demands during his absence, and both requests

were granted.150
In April 1675 Daudov made a further request concerning pominki, which cannot
have boosted his popularity with the officials of the Foreign Department. Having
realised that the additional pominki did not include any specifically intended for
Khiva, he wrote to the Tsar about the matter. He listed the pominki given to Pazukhin

for this purpose, provided full details of those which Pazukhin distributed during his
stay, and asked for identical items to be allocated to him so that he could avoid
unnecessary delays. Once again the Tsar agreed to his request, after checking and
finding the facts to be correct. Daudov was accordingly given an additional 100
roubles, with full latitude to buy ‘what goods were usual’ for Khiva, and he bought
hides in a variety of colours (red, pale blue, black and green), plus 10 squirrel fur
coats, 6 pairs of sables, 5 lamps and several yards of red woollen cloth.
149 armyano-russkie otnosheniya, 1, 66-67.

150 TsGADA, fond 109, op.1, 1671-1676 kn.4, listy 231a-7b, 247b, 248a, 252b, 242a-3a.
311

‘Abd al- ‘Aziz

The matter of the pominki being settled to his satisfaction, Daudov began to
consider how best to spend the 300 roubles which, together with 7 bundles of sables,
constituted his official reward for undertaking the mission. He acquired an interesting
assortment of goods to sell in Bukhara which included items known to be popular in
the khanate such as hides, red woollen cloth and fur coats,!>! and also, more
surprisingly, 163 kg 800 of tin and a vast quantity of wine. As Daudov was astute
and enterprising, one can only assume that he bought these additional items because
he had heard that there was a market for them in the khanate. The tin would probably
have been used to make various brass objects. As for the wine, the large quantity
(about 2,730 pints or 1,551 litres) purchased by the ambassador would seem to
indicate that, although nothing but mare's milk was drunk at ‘Abd al-‘Aziz's Court,
there were people in the khanate who had managed to reconcile the observance of
their religion with the use of intoxicating liquor. After purchasing these goods,
Daudov at once wrote to ask for them to be exempted from transit and other duties on

the way to Astrakhan, and this too was granted.
!52
The preparations for Daudov's journey were now complete. At this stage Hajji
Farrukh, who was to travel back to the khanate with him, received several partinggifts ‘in return for his own gifts’ and made ready for his own departure from
Moscow. These gifts consisted of gold material worth 30 roubles, nearly 8 yards of
red satin and over 5 roubles’ worth of crimson damask for himself, plus one length of

English cloth for each of the officials in his suite. He also took back a letter for “Abd
al-‘Aziz from the Tsar, in which Pazukhin's and Mulla Farrukh's embassies were
both mentioned, together with the khan's promise that he would send back all the
Muscovite slaves living in his country. Tsar Aleksei went on to announce the
despatch of Daudov and Kasimov. He asked the khanate authorities to assist Kasimov
on his way to India, promised that he would not delay ‘Abd al-‘Aziz's next
ambassador and listed his pominki for the khan as two gerfalcons and 500 roubles'
worth of sables. Finally he promised that if ‘Abd al-*Aziz sent an ambassador to
Moscow with Daudov, the presents which he delivered would be accepted with

pleasure and he would be dismissed without delay.153
Daudov, Kasimov and Hajji Farrukh left Moscow on 26 May 1675. There were
about 42 people in their party.154 They took with them some live sables, a number of
gerfalcons attended by six men, and an impressive quantity of goods, although they
do not appear to have received even a sample of the chiming clocks which had been
requested. One particularly valuable item was a portable organ with seven ‘voices’
(pipes) which was ‘carved with gold, its box painted in colours’ and which cost the
Tsar the princely sum of 100 roubles. This organ was sent with an under-steward

from Tsar Aleksei's palace who was expected to demonstrate it to ‘Abd al-‘Aziz.155
The party's journey down the Volga was not a happy one. In fact, by the time

they reached Astrakhan on 26 July, Daudov had antagonised nearly half the party.156
An altercation on the river led to a number of accusations and counter-accusations

151
152
153
154

Dandov took a total of 10 squirrel coats plus 10 hare coats.
Thid., listy 263a-7a, 268a-9b.
Khilkov, 458, 535-9.
An additional member of the party was a woman whom Hajji Farrukh seems to have married in
Muscovy, but it is not known at which point between Moscow and Astrakhan she joined the

party.

a Daudov, 15. TsSGADA, fond 109, op.1, 1671-1676 kn.4, listy 322a, 237a, 246b, 272b, 284b.
156

Aji dates in the original manuscripts are in the Old Style, but they are given here in the New or
Gregorian Style.

a12

1651-81

which were investigated in Astrakhan. And during the investigation Daudov's
character was painted in the blackest colours. But he refused to be confronted by his
accusers, calling them liars, and the Tsar, surprisingly, chose to ignore their
accusations. Perhaps this was because Daudov had written to him two weeks before
reaching Astrakhan with a series of complaints about his main accuser. This was the
chief falconer Epenet Poskhvisnev, whose evidence was supported by half the party.
It is also possible that Tsar Aleksei and his advisers suspected Daudov's twenty
accusers of colluding with one another and fabricating their evidence. Each of their
depositions gave a similarly incomplete account of events, and they were all equally
unconvincing.

The accusation levelled at Daudov by two falconers, four gerfalconers, three
soldiers, one organ-player, a servant, a priest, a secretary, and the seven members of
Hajji Farrukh's party, was recorded on different dates between 7 July and 3
September. It was as follows. At Simbirsk, an hour or two after leaving the boat on
which Epenet had respectfully entertained him and Hajji Farrukh, Daudov had
unexpectedly returned there. He then began to revile the falconer (for no apparent
reason), Calling him a traitor and a brother to Stenka Razin, and even attempted to

have Epenet hanged by the legs.
157
Daudov's letter of 13 July was more complex and more consistent. It related to
the whole of the journey up to Simbirsk and showed Epenet as a troublemaker.
Trouble had begun at Nizhnii-Novgorod, straight after Daudov collected the 100

roubles and the 50 roubles' worth of sables,!°8 which had been allocated to him ‘for
extreme cases of necessity’ and ‘for the most essential expenses’. Epenet, who had
no doubt realised that part of this (10 roubles in cash plus 10 roubles’ worth of
sables) was intended for the falconers' “special needs’ and for hiring carts to carry
them and their valuable birds, at once began to harass Daudov. He ‘constantly asked
for the money’, and when this was refused because the money was meant for their
needs ‘beyond the sea’, the disappointed falconer took to cursing, reviling and
threatening Daudov.
Quite apart from this Epenet's general behaviour had been thoroughly
reprehensible. Daudov explained how, not content with purchasing the birds, sheep
and chickens which he needed in order to feed the gerfalcons, Epenet had helped
himself liberally to sheep and cattle from the fields during the journey to Astrakhan,
ignoring Daudov's orders and giving the party a bad name. At Simbirsk Epenet
invited Hajji Farrukh to his boat and got him drunk. Then Epenet's companions, the
gerfalconers, who were seeing Hajji Farrukh off the boat, threw him into the water

and very nearly drowned him. The unfortunate Bukharan was in fact up to his neck in
water when Daudov heard his shouts. He sent two men to remonstrate with Epenet
but the falconer's response was to curse Daudov and to have one of his emissaries
beaten ‘nearly to death’ by the gerfalconers. It was probably at this stage, if his
accusers are to be believed, that Daudov went back to the falconer's boat, reviled him
and tried to have him hanged by the legs. Daudov, however, did not refer to the
incident, if indeed it took place, either because it did not cover him with glory, or

because he feared that, if the authorities became aware of it they might refuse to take
action against Epenet, on the grounds that he had been sufficiently punished.
Daudov then issued two requests. He asked that the falconer should be
157 TsGADA, fond 109, op.1, 1671-1676 kn.4, listy 316a-25b.
158 NB. In fact the Tsar had ordered 90 roubles plus 60 roubles' worth of sables to be given to him.

313

‘Abd al- ‘Aziz

reprimanded on reaching Astrakhan and also that he should be warmed against causing
injury or misfortune through his conduct, either in Muscovy or “beyond the sea’.
Epenet caused much alarm by getting drunk with the gerfalconers and soldiers, then
roaming about with them, wielding halberds and spears.
Thus ended Daudov's letter,!59 making altogether quite a damning case against
Epenet. The Tsar seems to have believed his story and to have taken the view that,
although Daudov may have over-reacted against him at Simbirsk, Epenet was entirely
to blame for the incident. As for the testimonies which upheld Epenet's version of the
incident, he probably decided that nearly half of them could be discounted, for they
had been lodged by the falconer's boon-companions. There still remained the matter
of the testimonies given by Hajji Farrukh and his suite, all of whom blamed Daudov,
and not Epenet, for the altercation. Why this attempt to blacken Daudov's character, if
indeed the Bukharan had been thrown into the river by Epenet's friends, and later

rescued by Daudov's men?
The answer to this lay in a letter which Hajji Farrukh wrote to the Tsar on 7
August, in which he accused Daudov of being overbearing, mean and dishonourable.
He complained that Daudov prevented him from purchasing a male Qalmagq slave in
Tsaritsyn. Daudov then allegedly sent robbers to beat him on the neck ‘from the strug
(river boat)’ (after the Bukharan had fallen into the water). Daudov had also reviled
him on the strug in front of others, causing a serious affront to his honour. He had
taken away the allowance of wine, beer and mead which Hajji Farrukh ought to have
received for the journey ‘from Kazan' to Novgorod and Astrakhan’, a slightly
confused statement which is difficult to reconcile with geographical facts.16°‘Not
even a charka’ (less than a quarter of a pint) had been given to him, the hapless
Bukharan added in order to strengthen his case. Finally, on reaching Astrakhan,
Daudov had deceived him by making a great show of friendship and becoming a
constant visitor to his house, only in order to seduce his wife, Sultana, and to take her

away from him.16!
There were several flaws in Hajji Farrukh's accusations which will have
weakened his case in the Tsar's eyes. To take first his accusation concerning Sultana.
Even if Daudov had indeed seduced his wife and taken her away, Hajji Farrukh was
himself at fault with the authorities concerning the lady in question. He ought to have
declared that he had married while in Muscovy and he ought to have asked permission
to take his new wife back to the khanate. As for the slave whom he wanted to
purchase, he ought to have asked permission for such a purchase while still in
Moscow, and since he had not done so, Daudov was perfectly right to forbid the
transaction. With regard to his complaint about the drink allowance, the authorities
probably took the view that Daudov was right to confiscate it if Hajji Farrukh was too
fond of drink and was indeed drunk at the time when the regrettable incident at
Simbirsk took place. Finally, it appeared from his description that he had been beaten
about the neck when he was in the water. If that was so and if the beating took place
at night, as claimed by Daudov, then he was unlikely to have seen his attackers. If
these were the gerfalconers, and they had indeed had thrown him into the water, they

159 TsGADA, fond 109, op.1, 1671-1676 kn.4, listy 288b-9b.
160 Nizhnii-Novgorod is in fact north of Kazan'.
161 TsGADA, fond 109, op.1, 1671-1676 kn.4, 315a-b, 321a. It is not known whether Sultana did
leave her husband in Astrakhan, as alleged, but she was with him, or back with him, nine days

after this letter was written and she gave the same evidence as he did regarding the incident at
Simbirsk.

314

1651-81

would have hit him intentionally. If on the other hand they had been sent by Daudov
to rescue him, they might well have hurt him accidentally.
Daudov's stay in Astrakhan was both lengthy and eventful. In a letter to Tsar
Aleksei he complained that he had been allocated an empty house, and given only two
strel'tsy (musketeers) to guard the Tsar's pominki. The dampness of the river
journey having damaged most of his furs, including even his ‘ambassadorial sable
coat’, he had put them all out in a garret to dry, only to find that his so-called guards
had helped themselves to many of them. Daudov then sent the men to be interrogated
and searched but, to his anger and dismay, voevoda Miloslavskii released them after
three days, without recovering any of the 531 roubles’ worth of furs which they had
stolen. It is not clear, from Daudov's complaint, whether these furs had been
purchased with his own money or with the Tsar's allowance for official goods, but
none of these items, namely a bundle of 40 sables worth 150 roubles, 3 black foxes,
30 sable hats, a sable-lined caftan, 2 pairs of sable gauntlets and 10 martens, were
listed among the pominki or among the goods sent with him from Moscow.
Daudov also complained that the Astrakhan authorities made no effort to expedite
his departure, as instructed, so that he was forced to remain nearly six weeks in
Astrakhan. While he was waiting for the busa to be made ready for his departure an
ambassador from Khiva arrived in Astrakhan and warned him that the route across the
Caspian was ‘quite impossible’, because the Turkmen did not obey the ruler of
Khiva. He advised Daudov to go overland, via the encampments of the Torgout
Ayuka, and Daudov wrote to Tsar Aleksei for instructions, explaining that many
traders had recently avoided the sea route, and made use of Ayuka's men to escort
them, for the same reason. The Tsar agreed that he should go overland but, before his
reply could reach Astrakhan, Daudov had left the town, by boat. He had decided to
try his luck with the Turkmen, rather than risk his gerfalcons dying on the overland
journey, due to the heat and to the almost total lack of water on the steppes leading to
the Yaik. Needless to say, voevoda Miloslavskii, who had been upbraided by the
Tsar for delaying Daudov, was indignant. He wrote to the Tsar alleging that the busa
had been prepared for Daudov at the greatest speed and that the ambassador had
refused to leave when it was ready. Miloslavskii had had to insist and to bully, and to
remind him that delay would ‘cause damage to (the Tsar's) affairs’ before Daudov

agreed to leave for Karagan, which he did on the following day! 162
Daudov's journey across the Caspian was difficult and long. According to his
biographer it lasted more than a month, during which time one of the gerfalcons
died.!63 The next lap of the journey, from Karagan to Khiva, was fraught with
danger throughout and took 25 days. After landing Daudov negotiated with the
Turkmen chief Kelesh who readily agreed to hire 100 carts to the party, but at a very
high price. Kelesh also provided them with an escort of 50 men who ought to have
been reliable because four of them were related to him, and they all knew that they
would be well paid for their services. But they led the party through arid steppes and
refused to find them water for ten whole days, having apparently planned to kill them
and to steal the Tsar's goods. The ambassadors and their suites only escaped with
their lives when they agreed to give them clothes and other presents as some sort of
162 TsGADA, fond 109, op.1, 1671-1676 kn.4, listy 293a-301b, 312a-3b. Daudov left Astrakhan on
24 August O.S./4 September N.S.

163 Daudov, 15. TSGADA, fond 109, op.1, 1671-6 kn.4, list 329a. Khilkov, 458. Different

accounts of the time taken for the crossing were given by Epenet (one week) and by the

interpreter Ivan Gornov (three weeks).

315

‘Abd al-‘Aziz

ransom.
Leaving behind the pitch-like empty steppes and their dangerous escort, they at
last arrived in Khiva on 31 October 1675, only to be told that Anusha was away

fighting ‘Abd al-‘Aziz.
Daudov later found out that Anusha and Subhan Quli had begun this war by
attacking ‘Abd al-‘Aziz and ‘seizing five towns of the very best and 20 smaller
towns’. The reason for the outbreak of hostilities is not known, but it was three
months before a truce was agreed. And by the time Anusha returned to Khiva the
towns of Chahar Jay, Hisar and Karategin were under Subhan Quli's control.!®
When Daudov saw Anusha, some time after 20 December, he at once asked for
the release of the Muscovite captives. Anusha at first refused, but later promised to
reconsider his decision. He would take into account ‘Abd al-‘Aziz's response to a
similar request and if this was favourable he would follow suit and release the very
same number of Muscovites. This may have been encouraging to Daudov but in
general Anusha's attitude was both offhand and unfriendly to his Muscovite guest.
He helped himself to two of the gerfalcons which Daudov was taking to Bukhara, an
unpleasant show of arbitrariness which recalled the days of Habash Sultan, and he
kept the ambassador waiting nearly six weeks for permission to leave for the khanate.
When the necessary permission was granted, it did not cover the provision of carts
for the journey, so Daudov and his party had to hire a number of conveyances before
leaving for Bukhara on 31 January 1676.1 They arrived there only two weeks later,
but the cold was so intense in the steppes that another gerfalcon died on the way.
The day after his arrival in Bukhara Daudov saw ‘Abd al-‘Aziz. He delivered all
his gifts, including the two remaining gerfalcons which were accepted with great
pleasure. The khan then gave Daudov a comprehensive sum for the party's upkeep
which, according to Daudov's translator, the tolmach Ivan Gornoy, totalled 350
roubles. This show of generosity was a good start to the mission and indeed ‘Abd al‘Aziz went on to prove himself far more amenable than Anusha in dealing with the
question of the captives. He at once promised to release twenty without ransom when
Daudov left and, straight after their second interview, he released a Muscovite priest
who was sent to live with the ambassador and minister to his spiritual needs. By the
end of March, or less than two months after Daudov's arrival, the khan offered to
send him back. But the ambassador was not prepared to risk any further encounters
with the Turkmen on the steppes. He wanted a Qalmaq escort to protect his party
from Turkmen and Qalmaq robbers, and he accordingly wrote to the Tsar about the
matter on 31 March 1676. Daudov had good reason to hope that Ayuka would send
the necessary escort if ordered to do so by the Tsar, for the Qalmaq chief had sworn
fealty to Tsar Aleksei in 1673, and again in 1675, promising to obey and serve him,
and to fight his enemies, as well as any Qalmaq who might attack his subjects.!66 In
fact, however, Ayuka was essentially unreliable. He had already broken his oath in
1675 by attacking the Volga and Kazan’ regions, and he would attack them again in
1676 and early 1677, only to apologise solemnly for his misdeeds shortly afterwards,
renewing his oath of fealty and calling God's wrath upon his head if he failed to keep
164 Daudov, 15. TSGADA, fond 109, op.1, 1671-6 kn.4, listy 329a, 335a, 339a. Materialy, 230.
165 TsGADA fond 109, op.1, 1671-6 kn.4, listy 334a, 337a-b. In Daudov's biography, (Daudov, 16)
which is based on the notes which he himself must have made later from memory, the earlier
date of 6/17 January is given for his departure from Khiva.

166 TsGADA, fond 109, op.1, 1671-6 kn.4, listy 337b-8b, 334b-Sa. Krest'yanskaya voina, Ill,
122-3, 168. Nefed'ev, 23-24. Kalmytskie istoriko-literaturnye pamyatniki, 64-66.

316

1651-81

his word again. 167
It is not known whether the new Tsar, Fedor II, who succeeded his father in

February 1676, wrote, as suggested, to Ayuka on Daudov's behalf, but Daudov
eventually left Bukhara without the required Qalmag escort in late August 1676. The
extensive report which he later submitted to the Tsar having unfortunately
disappeared, one can only guess at his reasons for deciding after all to cross the
Steppes without an escort. Perhaps he had realised that Ayuka could not be relied
upon and that he could hot afford to wait for further instructions, as life had become

far too expensive and dangerous in Bukhara. In a subsequent letter to Moscow,
which he wrote in Yaitsk in early June 1677, he explained that prices had risen
sharply in the khanate because of the protracted war with Subhan Quli. There was
also great bloodshed owing to this war and because ‘Abd al-‘Aziz was ‘being fought

at the time by his alamans (Alman) who live in the mountains’
.!68
Another unpleasant result of the war was that ‘Abd al-‘Aziz had gone back on his
promise to let Daudov take back 20 captives without paying ransom. This was a great
disappointment for the ambassador, who knew how keen Tsar Aleksei had been for
the greatest possible number of captives to be released. For this reason, Daudov
ignored ‘Abd al-‘Aziz's explanation that the captives were too valuable to be released
without payment and that they were needed for his army. He continued to press for
their release and in the end he had a modicum of success, for the khan agreed to let
him have five slaves who had already worked off their bondage.!6? Having secured
this much, Daudov may have thought it best to leave Bukhara before ‘Abd al-‘ Aziz
changed his mind again. In any case, according to Epenet he had finished his own
business by then, and if he had also finished the Tsar's business, all that remained to
be done was for him to ransom as many captives as he could afford before prices rose
any more. After doing so, and borrowing in order to provide them with the necessary
food, clothes and carts for the journey which had been refused by the khan, Daudov

set off for Khiva.17°
In Khiva Daudov was joined by Kasimov, who had left Bukhara for India on 13
March 1676 and had returned dispirited and disappointed with the outcome of his
mission. To begin with, although ‘Abd al-‘Aziz had given him a /aisser-passer in
which he asked Mughal officials to grant him every help and consideration, no orders
had been issued for guides, horses, or camels to be supplied for the journey.
Kasimov had no option but to hire them himself and also to distribute gifts in order to
secure the co-operation of the officials of Bukhara and Balkh.!7! He then got as far
as Kabul, but was not allowed to go any further, Aurangzib having written to the
local governor that he did not want relations with the Tsar, because their countries
were too far away fom each other. The Emperor also believed that the Tsar was
seeking enrichment, and not friendship through this embassy. Moreover he
considered that a strict Muslim like himself ought not to have relations with a
Christian monarch.
Kasimov's mission therefore ended in total failure. He had not seen the Emperor,

167 Nefed'ev, 25-26.

168 TsGADA, fond 109, op.1, 1677-8 kn.6, listy 13a-b.
169 TsGADA, fond 109, op.1, 1675 no.2, list 395.
170 TsGADA, fond 109, op.1, 1677-8 kn.6, list 18b. Epenet says that having sold his yufts, tin and

lead, Daudov had bought other goods in exchange. TsGADA, fond 109, op.1, 1675 no.2, listy

395, 401-3, 405.
171 Khilkov, 459. Russko-indiiskie otnosheniya, 220, 230.

317

‘Abd al-‘Aziz
he had not gathered the required information about the possibilities of trade, or about
the religion and the medicinal science of India. He also failed to bring back either the
artists, or the builders of bridges wanted by the Tsar. As for his pominki, they were
held up to ridicule and contempt in Kabul. After keeping them sealed up for quite
some time, which dried and damaged them, the Indian Customs officials assessed
them at a very low value and confiscated the best items. Not surprisingly, therefore,
when Kasimov tried to sell.them he was offered very little money, and instead of
bringing back the silver which the Tsar had hoped for, he was forced to borrow
heavily in order to accomplish at least part of his mission, which was to ransom and
bring back as many Muscovite slaves as possible. This in turn proved to be far more
costly than anticipated. The 18 who were ransomed in India cost an average of 47
roubles, or well in excess of the 15 to 30 roubles expected. Consequently, and
although he brought back a total of 40 captives, of whom 3 were purchased in Balkh
and 19 in Khiva, he had great difficulty in recovering his expenses. He had to write
repeatedly to the Tsar to justify himself and to explain why he had not been able to get

the slaves at a more reasonable rate.!72
Daudov had been far more successful with this part of his mission. He brought
back 55 Muscovites from Bukhara and Khiva, among whom there was a fair number
of soldiers, together with townsmen, peasants, women and at least one priest, whose
name was Ofanasii (Athanasius) Ivanov and who hailed from Kazan'.!73 The
numbers rescued had been larger at the outset, but of the 63 who set off with him,
eight had died en route. Daudov himself had ransomed only nine of them. Others had

been ransomed by fellow-captives or by the members of Daudov' suite, and many
had secured their release by working off their bondage. But even when he was not
responsible for freeing them, Daudov claimed to have helped in some way, either by
interceding on their behalf with their masters, or by providing them with clothes,
food, money and transport for the journey. And there is little doubt that they had all
benefited from travelling back in the relative safety of his large party. Daudov kept an
itemised account of the expenditure incurred on behalf of the former captives which
was later checked against their depositions. Although many of them said that his
account was exaggerated, or untrue, and that he had even tried to recover from them
money which belonged to the Treasury, he had little trouble in convincing Tsar Fedor

that his expensed should be repaid in full.174
During Daudov's stay in Khiva he witnessed an interesting development in
Anusha's relations with the khanate. First, in November 1676 he noted the arrival of
an ambassador from ‘Abd al-‘Aziz. This ambassador, Qara Batur Hajji, delivered a
generous quantity of gifts, including such items as gold and silver, and also a letter in
which the Bukharan ruler offered another of his daughters in marriage to Anusha, in
return for help in fighting Subhan Quli. Despite his recent alliance with Subhan Quli,
Anusha at once accepted ‘Abd al-‘Aziz's offer. He promised to marry the Princess
and to go to the khanate with an army, and he kept his promise. Ignoring a similar
request from Subhan Quli which included a similar offer of marriage, he sent a certain
Khan Mirza to Bukhara on 15 April 1677, with instructions to tell ‘Abd al-‘ Aziz that
172 Minaev, 224-5. TSGADA, fond 109, op.1, 1671-6 kn.4, listy 186-194b. Baikova, Rol’, 59-71.
Russko-indiiskie otnosheniya, 224-34. Materialy, 287-8, 392-7.

‘73 Daudov, 17. It is not known whether the priest who had been sent to Daudov shortly after his
arrival in Bukhara also left the khanate with him.

174 TsGADA, fond 109, op.1, 1675 no.2, listy 396-398, 399-403, 405. Materialy, 386-97.
Selifontov, 62-63. Daudov, 17-18. TsSGADA. fond 109, op.1, 1677-8 kn.6, list 56b and ff.

318

1651-81

he should make all the necessary preparations, as Anusha would soon come over to
marry his daughter and fight Subhan Quli.!75
Two weeks later Daudov left Khiva. His return journey was an eventful one. He
left the town on 1 May

1677 with a party of about 270 which included four

ambassadors with their suites, namely himself, Kasimov, ‘Ali Murad from Balkh and
Nadir Bahadur from Khiva, together with 103 former slaves and 100 traders. In view

of their numbers, and of the difficulties experienced by Daudov on his outward
journey from Karagan to Khiva, they chose to travel overland via Yaitsk/Gur'ev,
which they reached nearly six weeks after leaving Khiva. While they were there a
band of 250 Cossacks,!7° who had apparently been fighting the Qalmag, seized the
town on 5 June 1677 and robbed the party.
This incident was fully reported to the Tsar by Daudov. He wrote that his official
goods, his guns, his three cannons and all his ammunition had been taken and that he
himself had been left ‘naked’, as had the ambassadors of Khiva and Balkh, and all the

traders in the party. Only the amblers and the two live lynxes (sent by Subhan Quli)
had failed to interest the Cossacks. This was bad enough, but things got worse after
two of Daudov's servants, Levka Dement'ev,!77 and Antipka Afonas'ev, defected to
the Cossacks and did their best to get him killed. They told the Cossacks that he had
‘many precious stones and gold coins’, and he was only saved through the efforts of
the released captives. The priest Ofanasii Ivanov, in particular, assured the Cossacks
that Daudov had not been entrusted with the Tsar's official goods and that he had
used his own money to ransom them and to bring them out of the khanate. It was to
this information and to the fact that he was not born a Muscovite that Daudov owed
his life, for the Cossacks, who hated all things Muscovite, agreed to spare him. But
they destroyed Gur'ev before leaving with their booty and this, according to the
ambassador, included 7,000 roubles' worth of his own goods.178
A very different version of the events that took place in Gur'ev was submitted to
Fedor II by Daudov's fellow-traveller, the Khivan ambassador Nadir Bahadur. He

began by explaining how Daudov and Kasimov managed to persuade a reluctant
Anusha to send an ambassador to Muscovy. They told him that they had 40 camels
loaded with official goods and that they were afraid of travelling on their own in case
they were attacked by the Qipchaqs (Qazaqs), Qaraqalpaqs, Turkmen or Qalmaq in
the steppes. They also insisted, which was quite untrue, that they were as powerful as
the well-known Dolgorukii family in Muscovy, and this must have made an
impression upon Anusha who finally agreed to send Nadir Bahadur with them.
Daudov had been right to request the company of a Khivan ambassador, for, if we are
to believe Nadir Bahadur, it was thanks to his presence in the party that they were all
saved from an intended attack by the Turkmen.
However, he was paid back by Daudov and Kasimov with the blackest
ingratitude. When the party arrived near Yaitsk, Nadir Bahadur continued, they heard
that the Cossacks and the Qalmaq were fighting by the upper reaches of the river
Yaik. Daudov and Kasimov at once insisted that they must all seek refuge in the

175 TsGADA. fond 109, op.1, 1677-8 kn.6, listy 13b-14a.
176 TsGADA, fond 109, op.1, 1677-8 kn.6, list 16a. Daudov,
Cossacks is given by Daudov's biographer.

16. The far lower figure of 30

177 TsGADA, fond 109, op.1, 1677-8, kn.6, list 15b, He was a German who, presumably because
he was unable to pay his debts to Daudov, had become his bonded slave. Yuldashev, K istorii

torgovykh i posol'skikh svyazyakh, 53, says Lev'ka Dement'ev was a clerk.

178 TsGADA. fond 109, op.1, 1677-8 kn.6, listy 15a-16a. Daudov, 16-17. Selifontov, 89-90.
Bro

‘Abd al-‘Aziz

town, which they did, but some time later, when they were all preparing to sail across
the Caspian, Daudov and Kasimov invited the Cossacks over and gave them food and
clothes (to buy their goodwill). The following day the Cossacks robbed Nadir
Bahadur of all his belongings. He begged them to return his letter of credentials but
when the Cossack ataman agreed to do so, Daudov grabbed it and refused to hand it
over.
The party then resumed its journey, experiencing much hardship on the way,
except for Daudov and Kasimoy, who according to Nadir Bahadur, had kept all their
possessions. Just before reaching Astrakhan they drove their 40 laden camels to the
Tatar encampments and not content with this, Kasimov also concealed 1,000 roubles
at the Noghays' before reaching Astrakhan.
On entering the town on 14 July 1677 they declared to the Customs officials and
voevoda that both their official goods and their own possessions had been stolen by
the Cossacks, but later they secretly brought the 40 camels and their other
possessions into Astrakhan. Daudov and Kasimov had thus shamelessly deceived the

Tsar and robbed his Treasury.!79
This was a serious accusation, but it was found on investigation that Nadir

Bahadur's evidence was unreliable, for he had not been robbed at all. Nothing had
been taken from him by the Cossacks. The real victims at Yaitsk had been the traders
of the party, although all four ambassadors claimed to have lost all their belongings to

the Cossacks.!8° Daudov, Kasimov, Nadir Bahadur and ‘Ali Murad must have
colluded together initially in order to obtain the greatest possible compensation from
the Tsar, only to fall out when the two Muscovites turned out to be more successful in
hiding, or in selling their goods.
Despite Nadir Bahadur's accusation Daudov did not lose the Tsar's favour.
Perhaps he managed to persuade Fedor II that he had lost some of his belongings to
the Cossacks, and indeed one of the clerks in his party confirmed that the Cossacks
had taken the Tsar's ‘money and cor and gunpowder and cannon and robbed’ them
all ‘to the skin’.!8! Or else Daudov concocted a plausible explanation for not taking
his laden camels into Astrakhan. Unfortunately it is not known whether he and
Kasimov succeeded in countering Nadir Bahadur's accusations, or whether the Tsar
simply decided to overlook their attempt to defraud the Treasury in view of the great
success of Daudov's mission and the partial success of Kasimov's embassy. But
there is no doubt that Tsar Fedor continued to make use of Daudov's services and that
neither he, nor Kasimov, was punished as a result.
Nadir Bahadur's was by no means the only complaint received about Daudov. A

lengthy list of complaints regarding the ambassador's behaviour was handed over by
the falconer Epenet on his return to Astrakhan, and it is so damaging that it deserves
careful consideration. Epenet's first complaint related to the two gerfalcons seized by
Anusha in Khiva when they were on their way to Bukhara. He alleged that Daudov
himself had prompted Anusha to take the birds. Kasimov had been sent to tell him ‘on

the quiet’ that, since Daudov's instructions were simply to deliver two gerfalcons in
Bukhara and nothing had been said about what should be done with the others,
Anusha should simply help himself. This story is difficult to reconcile with Epenet's
179 Materialy, 240-6, 437-9.
180 Ibid., 247-8, 236. See TsGADA, fond 109, op.1, 1677-8 kn.6, listy 27a-b, 261a-b, for ‘Ali
Murad's claim and for the investigation into this claim which established that only one horse had

been taken from him in Yaitsk. See also Ulylanitskii, 55.

181 TsGADA, fond 109, op.1, 1678 no:2, list 39. His name was Vas'ka Bochiev.
320

1651-81

own statement, earlier in the same letter to the Tsar, according to which three live
birds had reached Khiva with them, which would have meant that Daudov was only
left with one to take to the Bukharan ruler.!82 His evidence is contradicted by
Daudov, who implies in his report that five gerfalcons were still alive by the time they
got to Khiva, since three were left after Anusha helped himself. It is also contradicted
by Anusha who wrote to the Tsar that he had taken two out of a total of nine
gerfalcons intended for Bukhara. If Daudov is to be believed, then ‘Abd al-‘Aziz still

received the two gerfalcons which the Tsar had promised in his letter, even though

one of the remaining birds died en route. And if what Anusha said was true, then his

action, for which he apologised, had neither reduced the size of the Tsar's pominki
for Bukhara nor harmed the Tsar's relations with the khan, for as many as six would
have still reached Bukhara, even though one more died en route.!83 Interestingly
enough, in this letter, which was sent off after 15 April 1677, the Khivan ruler
assured Tsar Fedor that his action would have no untoward effect, for ‘Abd al-‘Aziz

(with whom he had been at peace for over two years) was ‘as a father’ to him, and
would not quarrel with him as a result. And indeed Anusha, who was already married
to one of ‘Abd al-*Aziz's daughter, was then planning to marry another.184
Epenet went on to report that Daudov had ‘prayed to the Tatar God’ in Bukhara
and Khiva, and that he had not only shaved (his beard and his head?), but also eaten

meat on fast days. This accusation, if believed, could only have harmed Daudov in
the eyes of Tsar Fedor. However, it does not appear to have been taken seriously,
perhaps because it was known, through the report of the translater Ivan Gornoi, that a
captive Muscovite priest had been sent to stay with Daudov and minister to him,
shortly after his arrival in Bukhara.
Epenet added that Daudov had wrongly styled himself a boyar of the fourth rank
and also a voevoda of Siberia.185 He pretended that the town of Erensk, where he
had held the post of voevoda, was his appanage, and he claimed to have 47,000 serfs
of his own, among whom he listed Epenet and his companions. Furthermore Daudov
had got Hajji Farrukh into trouble by alleging that he had prayed ‘to the Muscovite
God’. Worse still, he had been guilty of meanness, violent behaviour and even
attempted murder. This was in connection with the living allowance which the party
had been given by ‘Abd al-‘Aziz. Epenet's béte noire had not only refused to share
this out, he had beaten those who objected to his behaviour until they were ‘halfdead’. He had also tried on several occasions to kill Epenet and the gerfalconers. He
had at first merely used stones, but had gone on to use a mace, then a sabre and
finally a pistol. Sadly it is not known how Daudov managed to answer this and other

182 TsGADA, fond 109, op.1, 1677-8 kn.6, listy 16b-17a.
183 Sadly the number of gerfalcons sent off from Muscovy is not stated in the various manuscripts
relating to the Daudov embassy. However, it seems clear that more birds were despatched than
needed, because they were known to be delicate and the Tsar wanted to ensure that the right
number reached Bukhara. The numbers quoted by Anusha appear excessive, because every single
gerfalcon was generally attended by one man, and there were only six men (four gerfalconers and
two falconers) able to look after them in the party. On the other hand, if five arrived in Khiva
and one died on the way there, as claimed by Daudoy, then a total of six were sent and the men

could have coped with them, although two of them were only falconers, and therefore not fully
trained in their care.

184 TsGADA, fond 109, op.1, 1677-8 kn.6, listy 16b-17a. TsGADA, fond 134, op.1, 1675 no.1,
list 6.

185 According to Selifontov (3) he had indeed become a boyar in 1675, although it is not clear what
rank he held. If he did claim to be a Siberian voevoda, it is because the Siberian voevody were

particularly powerful and had quite a lot of latitude with regard to foreign relations.

321

‘Abd al-‘Aziz

accusations, but his services to the Tsar were thought of so highly that he was
rewarded for the good work done in Bukhara with an increase in pay and was even
sent on a mission to Turkey in January 1679, only 16 months after his return from the

khanate.!86
The aggressive Armenian was never popular, however. A few years later he was
accused again of taking advantage of his position, but the Tsar took no notice and
continued to make use of him. Daudov was sent again to Turkey in 1696, he fought
for the Tsar in Siberia and Crimea in 1683 and 1687, and he held two more posts as
voevoda in 1680 and 1688. This enabled him to accumulate a large fortune which he
shared out among the children of his two marriages in 1701, and he died a year or
two later of natural causes, aged between 82 and 83.187
But what about the chihra agasi ‘Ali Murad who travelled to Muscovy with
Daudov in 1677? This ambassador, who had left Balkh with Kasimov in Shawwal
1087 (between 7 December 1676 and 4 January 1677), joined Daudov at Khiva,
having made his way there via Chahar Jiy in order to avoid crossing “Abd al-‘Aziz's
territory. He arrived in Astrakhan 12 days before Daudov and told the local voevoda
that the Cossacks had robbed him of nearly all his pominki in Yaitsk, these being 9
spinels, 9 emeralds, 9 gauntlets, 9 bows chased with gold, 9 knives, 9 beaver skins,
plus 81 black sheepskins, and the same auspicious number of lengths of velvet, goldspun silk, and Chinese golden damask.
!88 He even claimed that he and his suite had
been robbed of clothes, and in view of his desperate plight the local voevoda, Kot'ka
Shcherbatoi, agreed to let him have 50 roubles so that he might replace them in time
for his journey to Moscow. When ‘Ali Murad and his party left Astrakhan for Kazan'
on 13 September 1677 they were provided with two boats, 50 oarsmen, and a food
and drink allowance which was far larger than the one usually received by

ambassadors from the khanate.!8? Oats and money were also supplied to cover the
needs of the 9 amblers, the donkey and the two snow-leopards which were all that
remained of Subhan Quli's gifts.
“Ali Murad reached Moscow in January 1678 and was granted an audience within
a week. During his audience he delivered two letters from Subhan Quli to Tsar Fedor.
In the first one the ruler of Balkh explained that Kasimov had told him all about the
“good country’ (i.e., Muscovy) which existed in those (foreign) parts and about its

powerful ruler (i.e., the Tsar). He went on to give a long list of the towns over which
he held sway, including even Ghuri, and boasting that his power and happiness were
‘higher than anything could convey’ and that no one dared disobey him. This list, he
added with an attempt at flattery, had only been prepared in order to mirror the Tsar's
own letter. And he closed expressing the hope that diplomatic relations would be
established between them and that the Tsar would not be ‘too shy’ to send some
falcons over with the next high-ranking Muscovite envoy to Balkh. In his second
letter Subhan Quli wished the Tsar many years of good health and happiness. He
referred to Kasimov's embassy and to the Tsar's letter and said he had treated the
186 TsGADA, fond 109, op.1, 1677-8 kn.6, listy 17b-19b. Selifontov, 3, 8. Daudov, 18.
187 Selifontov, 16-18, 3-4; text, 3-4, 8, 89-90, 140-1, 153, 158. Despite his attempts to resign on
grounds of ill-health, he was still in service at 76.

188 For Kasimov's itinerary to Khiva, see Minaev, 226. TSGADA, fond 109, op.1, 1677-8 kn.6,
listy 27-27b; fond 134, op. 1, 1689-91 kn. 3, list 114b. Materialy, 236-7.
189 TsGADA, fond 109, op.1, 1677-8 kn.6, listy 27a-b, 24a-25a. He received 24 den'gi instead of
the usual 15, and twice as much drink as either Kuzai Nughai or Mulla Farrukh. His men were

also more generously treated. See A.J, IV, 43-44, for the allowance usually provided.

322

1651-81

Tsar's “envoys’ (i.e.Kasimov and his suite) ‘with honour and with all possible help,
giving them a (suitable) food allowance’ on each of their visits. Subhan Quli then
announced the despatch of ‘Ali Murad whom he described as honourable and loyal,
and after reciprocating the Tsar's wish for ‘love’, friendship and diplomatic relations,
he asked for gerfalcons, ‘as many as (the Tsar) would kindly send’.
“Ali Murad was very well treated in Moscow, although his gifts were not entirely
successful. The horses, in fact, were thought to be so thin and in such poor health

that they were sent back! 19° All his claims were satisfied without delay. He was
reimbursed for the extra food which he had to buy on his way to the capital, his
supply of sour mead was replaced, and his complaints against various officials were

duly investigated.!9! Then in the spring of 1678 he was dismissed with a letter from
the Tsar for his master.!% In his letter Tsar Fedor followed earlier precedent by coyly
‘accepting’ the offer of friendship which he himself had made in the first place. He
suggested that Subhan Quli prove his goodwill by freeing the Muscovite slaves who
were living in Balkh. He announced that he was sending two bundles of 40 sables
worth 200 roubles, plus two gerfalcons, as pominki. The letter closed with a
reference to ‘Ali Murad's claim that he had been robbed at Yaitsk and the Tsar pointed
out, as he had done in a letter to Anusha about Nadir Bahadur's similar claim, that

only a few merchants had in fact been robbed on that occasion.!%
“Ali Murad left Moscow in early June 1678. Three months later he left Astrakhan
for Balkh, well satisfied with his stay. He had been treated generously throughout.
Not only had he been reimbursed for the payment of Customs duties and for the
money spent on hiring carts, but his parting gifts from the Tsar did not reflect the
monarch's low opinion of his veracity. On the contrary, in return for the snowleopard and the two lynxes’ hides which were his personal offering to the Tsar, he
was given a very generous 80 roubles’ worth of sables, and each member of his suite
received sable pelts worth between 2 and 10 roubles.!™
No doubt Subhan Quli was pleased with the ambassador's report and with the
Tsar's letter and gifts. His name was now known even in far away Muscovy and it
was important for him to develop his foreign contacts in preparation for the day when
he could take over the khanate. That was why he had taken particular trouble in
choosing the ambassador who accompanied Yaka Taz Khan back to India in late
1675, i.e., a year before ‘Ali Murad had been sent to Muscovy. Khwajah Muhammad
Tahir was a great teacher, whom Aurangzib had met while in Balkh and whose
brother had been teaching in India since 1647. He was also a very determined man,

190 Materialy, 229-31. TSGADA, fond 109, op.1, 1677-8 kn.6, listy 25a-26b. TSGADA, fond 134,
op.1, 1689-91 kn.3, listy 114a-b. It is not clear whether they were sent back to Balkh or only to

Astrakhan.

191 TsGADA, fond 109, op.1, 1677-8 kn.6, pass.
192 yaterialy, 231n. Here the letter is said to have been written in April 1678, but this seems
unlikely if the envoy did not get an audience until 1/12 May and was not dismissed until 31
May/11 June (ibid., 410-1), for the Tsar's answering letter was normally written just before an
ambassador's departure.
193 Materialy, 229-31. ‘Ali Murad only appears to have been robbed of one horse.

194 Thid., 410-1. TSGADA, fond 134, op.1, 1689-91 kn.3, listy 114b-5b. In contrast, the sables
given to Kuzai Nughai and Mulla Farrukh were only worth

50 roubles and the ten arshin of

damask which were added in the case of Mulla Farrukh would have cost under 10 roubles, satin

and damask fetching 180 den'gi per arshin in 1652 (Kurts, "Sostoyanie", 119-20), and good
watered silk (ob'yar) fetching 160 den'gi in 1672, although prices varied between 140 and 200
den'gi (Kurts "Sochinenie", 142).

323

‘Abd al- ‘Aziz

although tactful and quick-witted enough to be able to defy the strict Mughal rules of
etiquette during his stay without causing lasting damage to Subhan Quli's relations
with the Emperor. Thus he insisted on handing Subhan Quli's letter directly to the
Emperor, although this was a privilege solely reserved to the Sultan's envoys. When
Aurangzib's own son, Mu‘azzam, tried to take the letter from him, Muhammad Tahir
objected that surely one intermediary between the two rulers, i.e. himself, was

sufficient. Later he was challenged for wearing a belt with a bejewelled knife during
the audience, to which he responded that the knife was purely for ceremonial use, so
that, by having it on his person, he was neither contravening the rules of etiquette nor
going against his religious convictions. And he was quick to explain that if the letter
which he delivered from Subhan Quli lacked the usual ceremonial heading, this was
only because the message it contained was identical to the one sent in another letter,
which his master had entrusted to Yaka Taz Khan.!95 Khwajah Muhammad Tahir's
intelligence and gift of repartee made a very good impression upon Aurangzib who
rewarded him generously and only kept him nine months at Court. He was given an
elephant, a carpetted silver litter, a bejewelled staff and a total of 21,000 rupees, and

was dismissed on 26 Rajab 1087/4 October 1676.19
‘Abd al-‘Aziz was just as aware as Subhan Quli of the importance of maintaining

good relations with foreign rulers, and 1676 was a particularly busy year in this
respect. When Daudov left in late August 1675 he was given a friendly letter for the
Tsar. ‘Abd al-‘Aziz promised to send an ambassador with pominki as soon as there
was an improvement in the situation in the khanate which was fraught with difficulties
because of his problems with his brother. While Daudov was in Bukhara the khan
despatched an ambassador to Constantinople to ask for help against Subhan Quli. A
few months later, no doubt because he had been told of Khwajah Muhammad Tahir's
embassy to Delhi, ‘Abd al-‘Aziz sent a minor envoy to Aurangzib. He also exchanged
embassies with Iran and with Khwarazm.!97
We are indebted to Daudov for most of this information, but unfortunately we
have no record of what happened after his departure in 1677. However, if we assume
that the marriage between Anusha and ‘Abd al-‘Aziz's daughter took place, as
intended, in that year, a joint campaign against Balkh would almost certainly have
followed. The Sultan's response to “Abd al-‘Aziz's request for help, on the other
hand, was disappointing. In Safar/March-April 1678 when ‘Abd al-‘Aziz's envoys
arrived in Istanbul they were told quite bluntly that Mehmet IV was unable to help, for
he intended to go and ‘march on Moscow’ that year. The Sultan had crushed the
Polish forces in 1672 and had determined to seize the part of Ukraine still held by the
Muscovites. He had been at war with Fedor II and the Elector of Brandenburg since
1676, and this was no time for releasing troops and sending them to deal with an

internal dispute. However, although his refusal to help Bukhara was understandable
in the circumstances, ‘Abd al-‘Aziz was disappointed by his response and
consequently allowed his relations with Istanbul to lapse.198
Meanwhile a serious famine broke out in the khanate as a result of the constant
wars and the increasing tax demands made by Subhan Quli and his brother in order to
195 Unfortunately the text of this letter is not known.

196 Haji Mir, 305a-7a. Saqi, 149, 150, 152.
197 Hey

fond 109, op.2, gramota 17. Saqi, 158. TSGADA, fond 109, op.1, 1677-8 kn.6, listy

198 Hammer, Geschichte, III, 701. Istoriya diplomatii, 230. Pares, 209. In the event the Turkish
armies had to content themselves with taking the Cossack capital of Chigirin.

324

1651-81

provide for their troops. Hearing in autumn 1678 that the people were reduced to
eating ‘carrion and other forbidden foods’, Aurangzib was tempted to intervene.
However, this was not possible, for the Mughal armies were still struggling to control
the Deccan, and until Qandahar was retaken a Mughal expedition to the khanate could

199
not be considered.

In view of the situation in the khanate it is hardly surprising that ‘Abd al-‘Aziz
was unable to send another costly embassy to Muscovy. In any case, an ambassador
would have had little chance of getting through, owing to the incidence of Cossack
and Torgout Qalmagq attacks on travellers. The Torgout attacks were in fact so serious
that “Abd al-‘Aziz's son-in-law, Anusha, urged the Tsar to build a strongly
garrisoned town on the peninsula of Mangqishlaq, at Karagan. He wrote repeatedly,
explaining that this was the best way of ensuring the safety of ambassadors and
traders from Bukhara and Khiva, although as an additional precaution Turkmen
hostages might also be taken.2°° But, to the disappointment of Anusha and ‘Abd al‘Aziz, Tsar Fedor took no action, being far more concerned with halting the Ottoman
advance. And in 1681 he succeeded in forcing the Sultan to agree to a 20-year truce.
However, although Muscovy and Ukraine had been spared, the Sultan then turned his
attention to Austria, leading eventually to the siege of Vienna and causing great
concern to the whole of Europe.
But to return to the khanate. Little is known about the remaining years of ‘Abd al“Aziz's reign, except that he sent an embassy to Iran in 1678, and that his relations

with Balkh remained distinctly unfriendly.2°! As for Subhan Quli, he continued to
develop his links with India. He wrote to Aurangzib and sent his letters with an ataliq
and an official envoy, both of whom were received on the same day (16 Rabi‘II

1091/16 May 1680), although separately, by the Emperor.?°2
In September 1681 a major event took place in the khanate which was to lead to
‘Abd al-‘Aziz's abdication and to Subhan Quli's accession. A fullscale attack was
launched by Anusha of Khiva and he succeeded, albeit temporarily, in taking the
town of Bukhara. Although many historians mention his initial success, and ‘Abd al‘Aziz's brilliant recovery of his capital a few days later, only two of them give a
reason for Anusha's unexpected attack. Muhammad Yusuf Munshi writes of
incitement by Subhan Quli, which is of course likely, although it neither explains nor
justifies Anusha's sudden decision to attack ‘Abd al-‘Aziz, who, since 1677, had

been his
historian
attacked
al-‘Aziz

ally, as well as his father-in-law twice over. The nineteenth-century Khivan
al-Mu’nis provides at least a partial explanation. He says that Anusha
Ma wara’ al-nahr in retaliation for the active encouragement given by ‘Abd
to a Khwarazmian pretender. This Prince, who was the son of the former

Khwarazmian ruler Ilbars, is said to have been provided with a Bukharan army, and

to have invaded while Anusha was besieging, and taking, the town of Mashhad.
But why should ‘Abd al-‘Aziz have acted so disloyally towards his son-in-law?
Was he displeased that Anusha had taken a town which had previously belonged to

Bukhara? Was he afraid that if his son-in-law took over Khurasan he would become
Subhan Quli's neighbour, which would enable them to join forces against Bukhara

199 Sagi, 169. ‘Inayat Khan, 37a-b. CHI, IV, 277-8. Riazul Islam, A Calendar, I, 457.
200 TsGADA, fond 134, op.2, gramoty nos.35, 37, 38; op.1, 1689-91 kn.3, listy 133a-b, 134b.
Messages to this effect were sent with ‘Abd al-Rahim in 1676, with Daudov, Miron Mustofin

and Nadir Bahadur in 1677, and also with Abreim Azizov (Ibrahim ‘Aziz) in 1689.
201 Abdul Ghani, Sayyido Nasafi, 22. Hajji Mir, 281b.
202 Saqi, 193.
325

‘Abd al-‘Aziz
even more easily than in the past? Or was he so concemed to hear that Anusha had
taken the title of Shah, which had dangerous political and religious connotations, that
he decided to help Ilbars's son, hoping that news of his invasion of Khwarazm would
force Anusha to abandon Khurasan and return home? Well, if such were ‘Abd al‘Aziz's reasons and if he supported the Khwarazmian pretender, as alleged, he must
have been taken aback by Anusha's reaction to the news. Although Anusha left
Khurasan, as expected, he did not go back to save Khwarazm. He sent a small force
there to deal with the pretender while he himself marched on Bukhara. This was an
inspired move, for ‘Abd al-‘Aziz was not in the town. He was somewhere

near

Karmina with his army, dealing with a rebellion by the Khitai and Qipchaq tribes.2°
Bukhara was totally unprepared for Anusha's attack, the governor, Iskandar Bi
Sarai, having completely neglected his duties. When the Khwarazmian army arrived,
the garrison, who, according to Khwajah Samandar, were engaged in “womanizing
and drinking’, put up little effective resistance. Iskandar Bi himself did fight bravely,
but he had only a few men with him and they could not stop the enemy. The
Khwarazmians easily breached the walls, plundered the town for several hours, and
took large quantities of booty. At this point the nobles, the amirs, and even the Juibari
shaikhs thought it best to offer their submission and the town fell to Anusha. This
was an immense achievement, for Anusha had secured the capital of the khanate with
minimal difficulty. But his triumph was short-lived. On hearing the news ‘Abd al‘Aziz set off at once and arrived outside Bukhara on 22 Sha‘ban/7 September 1681,

about 24 hours after the town had fallen. Although it was midnight, he launched an
immediate assault. A breach was made in the town walls and he had soon fought his
way back into the citadel. The following day those Khwarazmians who had not been
killed in the night ‘fled before him like fog before the sun’, while the townspeople
flocked to pay court to their victorious monarch. Shortly afterwards Qazaq and
Qaraqalpaq reinforcements came over from Samargand and their arrival was sufficient
to chase all the remaining Khwarazmians from the khanate.2%
The most serious crisis in “Abd al-‘Aziz's reign was over. He rejoiced at his
victory, but not for long. Within a few weeks he took a major decision which was to
startle his subjects and his neighbours and even his brother. He decided to abdicate in
favour of Subhan Quli.29
There were several reasons for ‘Abd al-‘Aziz's sudden decision. Firstly he was
exhausted after his victory. He was more than 67 years of age and unwilling to
undertake further military campaigns, whereas, if we are to believe Qipchaq Khan,
Subhan Quli was already on his way to Bukhara with an army.?°© Secondly his
Treasury, as already noted by Pazukhin in 1670, was chronically short of money.
Thirdly he seemed to be losing effective control and he realised that he could no
longer rely upon the loyalty of all his subjects. Although he had just crushed the
rebels near Samarqand, he was well aware that others were ready to rise against him.
203 Shir Muhammad, 454. Mirza Amin, 98a. Khwajah Samandar, 77, mentions no rebellion by the
Khitai. Qipchaq Khan, 277a-b. Hajji Mir, 288a, alone says that ‘Abd al-‘Aziz was hunting near
Samarqand when Anusha took Bukhara.
204 Shir Muhammad, 454. Al-Mu’nis does not admit that Anusha was forced to flee. He says that
after the khutbah was read in his name in Bukhara, Anusha sent an army to attack ‘Abd al-‘Aziz,
then appointed a governor to Bukhara and left for Khiva. When the army sent against ‘Abd al“Aziz was defeated, Anusha's appointee abandoned his post and fled back to Khwarazm.
205 Khwajah Samandar, 78-85. Mirza Amin, 98a-102a. Hajji Mir, 288a-9a. Qipchaq Khan, 277a-b.
Muhammad Yusuf Munshi, 267b-8a.

206 Qipchaq Khan, 378a.
326

1651-81

He thought it wise, therefore, to show ‘patience and caution’ rather than chastise the
governor of Bukhara for his ineptitude and negligence, because he knew that the
governor's fellow-tribesmen, who lived near Qarakil and Chahar Jay, were likely to
support him.
For all these reasons, after much deliberation and soul-searching ‘Abd al-‘Aziz
decided to abdicate. When he wrote to tell his brother of his decision Subhan Quli at

once set off from Balkh with his son Iskandar. ‘Abd al-‘Aziz sent his amirs to meet
him at Qarshi and ordered them to welcome him (with as much warmth) as Imam Quli
had shown to Nadir Muhammad, but Subhan Quli refused to see his brother or to
receive the crown from him. Saying that a meeting of two monarchs in one realm
might lead to rebellion, he asked his brother to leave the capital before he arrived.

“Abd al-‘Aziz was hurt and angered by this expression of distrust. He was also
concerned to hear that Subhan Quli had seized Qarshi on his way to Bukhara. In fact,
if we are to believe Muhammad Yusuf Munshi, ‘Abd al-‘Aziz was so angry that he
nearly changed his mind about abdicating. His nobles indeed urged him to march
against his brother, but Subhan Quli's envoy apparently managed to persuade him
that he would earn a greater reward in the next world if he freely relinquished his
earthly throne. Moved to tears by the tale of the ninth century ruler of Balkh who gave
up his throne in order to serve God, ‘Abd al-‘Aziz then gave orders to prepare for his

departure.207
He left Bukhara on 14 Shawwal 1092/27 October 1681, seven weeks after
recapturing the town. He was accompanied by servants and other pilgrims, who may
have numbered as many as 4,000.2°8 Most of his Court poets also accompanied him
on pilgrimage and later settled in India.2°9 They decided not to return to Bukhara,
although they knew that Subhan Quli was interested in poetry and was himself a poet
of some renown. Perhaps they had been told that Subhan Quli would not commission
literary works,?!° or else they feared that he would resent their endeavour, over
several years, to praise his brother's achievements and decry his own.
“Abd al-‘Aziz travelled slowly via Chahar Jay, Marw, Mashhad, Nishapur,
Semnan and Kashan to Isfahan, visiting the tombs of holy men on the way. He was
warmly welcomed at every stage. Shah Sulaiman even went some distance out of
Isfahan to welcome him and then entertained him in great style while he was there.
Rich carpets and vessels decorated with gold and silver filled the house that was put at
his disposal. During the banquets and illuminations organised in his honour the
Iranian monarch read out poems on the theme of friendship. Before ‘Abd al-‘Aziz left
Isfahan Shah Sulaiman gave a farewell party for him in an enormous garden, in
which every tree bore a candle and there were waterfalls in the garden. During the
feast, which lasted 24 hours, precious gifts were exchanged. Altogether, according to
Hajji Mir, the Shah gave ‘Abd al-‘Aziz 24 laks (2,400,000 shahi) for his journey and

spent as much again on entertaining him.*!! For his part “Abd al-“Aziz gave his host a
207 Wajji Mir, 289b, 296b-7b. Mirza Amin, 101b-4a. Muhammad Yisuf Munshi, 268a-270a.
208 Qipchaq Khan, 278a. Muhammad Yusuf Munshi, 270a, gives the numbers of pilgrims as
30,000, but he generally tends to exaggerate. Other sources only mention ‘a number of nobles,
khwajahs and amirs’ or a few faithful servants and a number of unspecified poor. Hajji Mir,
289b; Khwajah Samandar, 86; and Mirza Amin (101b-4a), give no total figures for the numbers

in his party.

209 Abdul Ghani, Sayyido Nasafi, 165-89.
210 And indeed he seems to have only commissioned medical works during his reign.

211 }4jji Mir, 292a-b. This would have been worth between 1.4 and 1.7 million tanga if the rate of
exchange was still 1 tanga = 1.4 to 1.6 shahi as under Shah Jahan, and somewhat less (about 1.2

327

‘Abd al-‘Aziz
goblet decorated with Badakhshan spinels, several lengths of precious material, a
number of speedy horses, falcons and gerfalcons, together with several strings of
camels.

However,

the present which, according to Muhammad

Yusuf Munshi,

delighted the Shah above all, was a masterpiece of calligraphy which Maulana Hajji

Yadgar had taken seven years to complete.?!2
From Isfahan ‘Abd al-‘Aziz made his way via Kirmanshah to Baghdad. In the
desert he is said to have been waylaid by a large party of Bedouins who demanded
from him far more than the twenty to forty thousand gold dinars which he offered to
pay as a ‘toll’. ‘Abd al-‘Aziz refused their demands, took up arms and put the
Bedouins to flight, after a battle in which some of his party were killed. He then
continued his journey and reached Mecca wehre he performed the rites required of a
pilgrim. Two years later he set off for Mukha and India, but fell ill at Mukha and his
illness proved fatal. He died on 14 Sha‘ban 1094/8 August 1683, aged 69. The
suddenness and virulence of his illness caused such surprise that his entourage was

thought to have poisoned him.213
F,
‘Abd al-‘Aziz's reign had been a troubled one, marred by the conflict with his
father until 1651 and by Subhan Quli's jealousy and hostility during most of the
following 30 years. He left behind him a divided country and a badly debased
coinage, the silver content of which had been reduced to no more than 7.5 per
cent.214 On the positive side he also left an excellent reputation as a poet and patron of
the arts. He put together an impressive library and engaged a very large number of
Court poets.
Among the surviving buildings attributed to him the most famous is a sumptuous
medresseh in Bukhara which he conceived as a monument to his reign. This building,
which was decorated by foreign workers using Chinese, Indian and also perhaps
Turkish motifs, was intended to stand out among all the monuments of Bukhara.
Indeed he spent lavishly in order to achieve this. His medresseh has suffered much
from the ravages of time, but it is still striking in appearance and it is shown to all
foreign visitors to the town as a matter of course. Nevertheless some art historians
feel that its self-conscious decoration does not compare with the majestic simplicity of

the monuments which he hoped to eclipse.2!5

to 1.4 million tanga) if the tanga maintained its value under Aurangzib although the taman lost
one-fifth of its value against the rupee. Hodivala, 194.

212 Hajji Mir, 290a-2b. Muhammad Yasuf Munshi, 272a. Kaempfer, 212, was told that an escort of
7,000 was sent to welcome ‘Abd al-‘Aziz to Isfahan and to bring him along a road covered with

gold cloth, but he places this erroneously in 1670.

213 Hajji Mir, 292b-6b. Muhammad Yusuf Munshi, 272a-b. Both these writers say he died at 74,
but if he died on 14 Sha‘ban 1094/8 August 1683, as stated by Hajji Mir, and was born in
1023/1614, as agreed by Mahmud b.WaAli (216b) and Muhammad Badi‘ (LOIVAN, 258a), he
must have been just under 70. Khwajah Samandar, 86-88, gives no date for his death, but
appears to think that he died shortly after completing the pilgrimage.

214 Davidovich, Istoriya, 92.
215 Abdul Ghani, Sayyido Nasafi, as above. Istoriya Uzbekskoi SSR, I, 588. Shishkin, 79-82,
criticises the excessive detail of this medresseh, the poor quality of its majolica, the standard of
its drawing and the dullness of its colours.

328

9
Subhan Quli: the last great Ashtarkhanid
(1681-1702)

On 28 October 1681, one day after ‘Abd al-‘Aziz left Bukhara, Subhan Quli entered
the town. He was warmly welcomed by the people, the officials and the religious
leaders, and his accession took place at once. He ‘put on the crown and charqab
(coronation gown)’, coins were minted, and a multitude of poems were improvised,
and recited, to grace the occasion.
A few weeks later, on 21 Dhu ’1-qa‘da/21 November 1681, an ambassador from

Bukhara arrived at Aurangzib's Court. Since the journey to Delhi took a minimum of
six weeks it can be assumed that the ambassador in question had been despatched by
“Abd al-“Aziz on regaining control of Bukhara, and that he knew nothing about the
abdication. He delivered ten fur collars and a string of camels to the Emperor, and

was sent back without delay, with the customary robe and 5,000 rupees.!
Meanwhile Subhan Quli's first priority as ruler had been to appoint a governor for
Balkh. Choosing his eldest son, Iskandar Sultan, for the task, he named him his heir

and married him off to the daughter of Qasim Muhammad Sultan, his late nephew and
former enemy, in order to secure the allegiance of his relatives. Before sending him to
his new post, he instructed his son to visit the shaikh al-Islam, Khwajah Nasr Allah,
who blessed him and renamed him Muhammad Muqim Sultan, chosing the name of
“Mugim’, or assiduous, because Iskandar was known for his assiduous observance
of the laws of Islam. However, despite his father's precautions and the young man's
meekness and gentleness, Iskandar's rule in Balkh was short-lived. He was poisoned
either by his younger brother, Abu ’1-Mansir, who hankered for the throne of Balkh,
or by one of Aba ’I-Mansiur's supporters. Estimates about the length of his rule vary
greatly. Hajji Mir says it only lasted 299 days, but gives the date of his death as 1
Dhi ’1 hijja/21 November 1683, i.e. over two years after his father's accession.
Qipchag Khan and Muhammad Yusuf Munshi both make it about two years, but their
dates are flawed, for they place the Prince's rule and his father's accession a year too

early. 2
Following Iskandar's assassination the amirs of Balkh wrote to ask Subhan Quli
for a new governor, but were forced to accept Abu ’l-Mansir as ruler during
Muharram 1094 (between 31 December 1682 and 30 January 1683). When Subhan
Quli 's answer arrived and Abi ’1-Mansir found out that his father had in fact named
his brother ‘Ibadallah, who was also living in Balkh, he at once entered ‘Ibadallah's

1 Saqi, 216.
2 Hajji Mir, 299a-b. Qipchaq Khan, 279a-b, dates the Prince's rule from late Dhu ’J-qa‘da 1091/7
November 1680 to 1 Dhii ’1-hijja 1093/1 December 1682. Muhammad Yisuf Munshi, 273b, 276a8a, dates it between mid Rabi‘II 1091/15 May 1680 and shortly before 9 Jumada I 1094 (sic)/6

May 1683.

Subhan Quli

appartements and put him to death. Then he gave orders for ten days of festivities to
mark his accession. He told merchants and craftsmen to put on display their richest
materials, and goods from China, Europe and other places were seen in their shops.
Musicians, singers, dancers, poets were made to perform in the streets around the
clock, and wine flowed freely, much to the amazement and shock of Abi *1-Mansur's
new subjects. The Prince then gathered a bodyguard of 10,000 men and a mounted
suite said to have numbered more than 20,000, or even more than 30,000. Soon his

violent temper caused him to be disliked and feared, not only by his subjects, but
even by the Shah and the Emperor, both of whom sent armies to their frontiers in case

he decided to attack.3
Subhan Quli, who was keen to establish friendly relations with his neighbours,
and who had sent an ambassador to Iran in autumn 1682,4 was incensed when he
realised the damage that his son was likely to cause. He was even angrier when he
heard that Abu ’1-Mansir took no interest in governing the province, that he spent his
time drinking and seeking pleasure, and that, just because his mother was a Qalmaq,
he appointed Qalmagq slaves to important posts above the “Uzbegs’ (i.e. the mainstay
of Shaibanid and Ashtarkhanid power) of the province and the ‘Turks’. In view of
this he decided to rid the country and himself of one who was ‘a disgrace to the
khalifate (throne)’. Whether or not, as claimed by Qipchaq Khan, Subhan Quli
actually sent the ataliq Jadum Ming and the mirab Nadir Turkman to Balkh for that
purpose, these two men ambushed the Prince and killed him at his aunt's house on 17

Jumada I 1094/14 May 1683,° only four months after his accession.
Some time before Abu ’1-Mansir's death Subhan Quli had already tried to mitigate
the damage which his son might have caused to his relations with Aurangzib by
sending an ambassador to India. This ambassador, whose name was Muhammad
Sharif, arrived at Aurangzib's Court about a week before the Prince's murder.

Nothing is known about the message which he delivered, but it seems likely that it
would have included an announcement of Subhan Quli's accession, together with an

assurance of his friendly feelings for the Emperor, and a promise that he would do his

utmost to restrain his son.®
Straight after Aba ’1-Mansir's murder his younger brother, Sadiq Muhammad,’
was placed by the assassins on the throne of Balkh. This time Subhan Quli accepted
the fait accompli and confirmed the Prince as governor of the town,® but Sadiq
Muhammad soon became unpopular because of his excessive cruelty against Abu ’1Mansiur's murderers, and his vindictive hatred against his brother's former advisers.
In particular he tried to eliminate the whole Ming tribe solely because Yar Muhammad
Bi Ming had been close to Abu ’1-Mansiir and because Yar Muhammad's brother,

3 Hajji Mir, 299b, 300a. Muhammad Yisuf Munshi, 277b-8b, says ‘Ibadallah's nomination arrived
before Abu ’1-Mansiur's accession but was ignored by his brother's supporters. Later they urged Aba
*1-Mansir to have the young man put to death in case he should rebel and cause trouble, and this
was done.

4 Du Mans, 339.
5 Qipchag Khan, 279b. Hajji Mir, 300a, places his death a year later. Muhammad Yusuf Munshi,
279a, gives no date for this and does not mention Subhan Quli's involvement in the plot. He says
the Prince was killed at the instigation of the mirab Khwajah Kash Nadir, who had become
intimate with Prince Sadiq Muhammad.

6 Saqi, 226.

7 Qipchag Khan, 279b says Abii ’1-Mansir was only 17. Hajji Mir, 300a, gives his age as 26.
8 If he had engineered his son's murder, Subhan Quli could hardly have been surprised by the
assassins’ choice, for he would have told them whom he wished to see in his place.

330

1681-1702

Adina Muhammad, had dared to criticise his own choice of advisers. Although he had
been a loyal servant of Subhan Quli's for years, Adina Muhammad was arrested. He
was later released by his fellow tribesmen and fled to Shiburghan,

but Sadiq

Muhammad followed with an army, and after an attempt at compromise had fallen
through, the Prince took the town and put most of its inhabitants to the sword. The
Qunghrat tribe, who had risen in support of another of Abi ’l-Mansir's advisers, the
mir akhur Badi‘, were disposed of with equal brutality, as were the Alchin, whose
leader, Bayat Qara, had attacked the outskirts of Balkh while Sadiq Muhammad was
chastising the Ming and the Qunghrat. When it became known that 400 Alchin had
been put to death without mercy, several amirs fled to Bukhara and begged Subhan
Quli to intervene.? The khan, however, took no action. Perhaps he was pleased that

his-son was acting energetically against rebels, and, by giving him carte blanche in
the province, he may have hoped that he would be able to enlist Sadiq Muhammad's
help in the future.
Subhan Quli was then trying to defend the khanate against Anusha of Khiva, who
after a few years of peaceful co-existence, had resumed his attacks on the khanate.
The timing and number of these attacks, which spread over some 18 months, has
been difficult to establish, as the accounts of contemporary historians conflict either
wholly or in part. Thus, for example, according to Khwajah Samandar, Anusha
undertook two campaigns against the khanate in that period, but Mirza Amin clearly
describes three entirely separate campaigns. All agree, however, that for a few
months Anusha took over Samargqand, that Sadiq Muhammad failed to help his father
relieve the town, that Subhan Quli marched on Balkh to punish him after Anusha left
Samargand, and that an ambassador from Aurangzib called Zabardast Khan was sent

to the khanate shortly after this. If Aurangzib's ambassador was indeed despatched on
25 Rabi' II 1096/31 March 1685, as recorded in the official Mughal history by Saqi
Musta‘idd Khan, then Samargand must have fallen in the summer of 1095,!° and not
in the summer of 1096 or in 1097 as claimed respectively by Mirza Amin and
Khwajah Samandar. The dates advanced by these historians would thus appear to be
wrong, but their accounts are still very valuable, for they witnessed many of the
events which they describe. And they provide a wealth of detail which supplements
Qipchag Khan's rather sparse version of events.!!
But to return to Anusha, although it might seem surprising that he attacked his
former ally, in fact he had never been very steadfast in his attitude towards the rulers
of Balkh and Bukhara, and, like his father, he seems to have welcomed any pretext
for attacking the khanate. According to Khwajah Samandar, on this occasion Anusha
had been asked to invade by the disaffected governor of Samarqand, Khwajah Quli Bi

Utarchi. It is not known why the amir, who had taken part in Subhan Quli's
coronation, should have rebelled, but he apparently had the support of the Khitai tribe
and he retired to a fortress near Qarshi, from where he harassed the local people.
Then, after refusing to see Subhan Quli, or to accept his offers of friendship,

conveyed to him by Khwajah Samandar, he went to Khwarazm and persuaded
Anusha to march with him on Bukhara.
When they reached the oustskirts of Bukhara, Khwajah Samandar continues,
9 Qipchaq Khan, 279b-80a. Hajji Mir, 300b-1b, says the Prince began his reprisals straight after
being named his father's heir on 3 Dht ’I-qa‘da 1095/12 October 1684. Muhammad Yusuf
Munshi, 279a-8 1b.
10 Saqi, 255. But see "Annotated tables" below for a coin issued by Anusha in Samargand in 1096.

11 Khwajah Samandar, 95, 100. Mirza Amin, 110b.
331

Subhan Quli

Khashika Bi, who had recently been appointed governor of Samarqand, marched
towards Bukhara to give battle. Just before the battle of Aksach ‘all the important and
the ordinary people’ went over to the Khwarazmians, together with the entire Khitai
tribe, but despite their support the enemy were ‘destroyed’. The remainder of
Khwajah Samandar's evidence about this campaign is rather inconsistent for he says
that the Khwarazmians (were able to) ‘run away’ following their crushing defeat and
even, apparently, to rally round Anusha who prepared for battle and attacked
Ghujduwan ‘with an enormous army’!
Mirza Amin disagrees in many ways with Khwajah Samandar's account. Not
only does he place the attacks on Ghujduwan during the third campaign, and not
during the first campaign, but he does not suggest that Khwajah Quli Bi was
responsible for the Khwarazmian invasion. According to him, Khwajah Quli Bi was
actually in Bukhara during Anusha's first campaign. The amir is not said to have
rebelled against the khan at that stage, although it seems clear that even then he did his
best, from his privileged position as one of the khan's.advisors, to try and prevent the
Bukharan side from engaging the enemy. The first attempt was in the last days of the
month of Rajab, and probably in late July 1683 if the year, according to the sequence
of events outlined above, was 1094. Anusha having arrived at the bridge Baba

Mahmid outside Bukhara with a large army, Subhan Quli appointed Khishika Bi and
a small number of warriors to defend the capital. Khwajah Quli Bi tried to stop them
crossing the bridge, but they pushed past him and returned that same night with 100
captives who were put to death at once on the khan's orders. Anusha was not
discouraged by this setback. He remained near Bukhara and his army proceeded to
plunder the area systematically. A few days later Subhan Quli led his army out of
Bukhara as far as one of his country estates, the chahar bagh Haram Sarai. There he
stopped, pronounced a blessing over Khishika Bi and the army, and sent them to
engage the enemy. At this stage Khwajah Quli Bi interfered again to try and stop the
army. He objected to the nomination of Khushika Bi as leader of the army and
Subhan Quli obligingly named the qish begi Yeilaq Bi in his place. The troops then
set off, as planned, whereupon the Khwarazmians retreated as far as Tarab, southwest of Bukhara, taking with them their booty and the numerous peasants whom they
had captured. There they stopped to give battle, but they were defeated and forced to
leave the country, with the Bukharans in hot pursuit. Thus, according to Mirza Amin,
Anusha's first campaign had come to an end by 5 Sha‘ban (1094/30 July 1683).
When he heard of the enemy's discomfiture Subhan Quli was delighted. He decided
that he would like to join his amirs in pursuing them, but he was apparently dissuaded
from doing so by the Juibari and other shaikhs. They said he would be unwise to
expose himself to danger, and he went back to the capital.!!
Mirza Amin places Anusha's second attempt to seize Bukhara shortly afterwards.
During this second campaign, which is not mentioned by Khwajah Samandar,
Subhan Quli apparently sent Khishika Bi to Vardanzi, north-west of the capital, with
an army of 400 men who fortified the town ready for battle. However, Anusha went
straight to Bukhara without stopping, either at Vardanzi, or at any of the usual
camping-stages on the way. And he managed to plunder the suburbs of the capital, to
kill many of the inhabitants and to take many others prisoner, before making at last
for Vardanzi and the Bukharan army. But although he had the advantage of surprise
and superiority in numbers, his army being sixteen times larger, Anusha was defeated

11 Khwajah Samandar, 89. Mirza Amin, 107a-109a.

332

1681-1702

with very heavy losses, whereupon he left the khanate, taking with him ‘some
ungrateful ones, such as the members of the Khitai and Qipchaq tribes’ .12
Before turning to what Mirza Amin describes as Anusha's third expedition and
Khwajah Samandar calls his second expedition, it should be mentioned that according
to Khwajah Samandar the first campaign came to a close after two major defeats were
inflicted upon Anusha at Ghujduwan on two consecutive days. After the second battle
Anusha was forced to retreat, but he only did so during the night, taking with him to
Khwarazm ‘the wicked ones who repudiated the love of Bukhara’. Khwajah
Samandar adds that at this stage Subhan Quli rewarded his soldiers lavishly, giving
horses with gold trappings and bridles encrusted with precious stones to the warriors,
swords with golden scabbards to the palace servants, and large quantities of money,
together with caftans made of silk and European velvet, to all outstanding warriors
(baha@duran).}3
Whether or not the khan, who was always short of money, did distribute such
extravagant gifts, and they are not mentioned by Mirza Amin, Anusha was certainly
defeated, if not crushed, at Ghujduwan. Mirza Amin explains that Anusha's third
expedition began with a rather dastardly act in that town. Acting ‘on the inspiration of
the devil’ the ruler of Khwarazm marched into Ghujduwan on 17 Jumada II/1 June
1684 at a time when the people were engaged in prayer, and, falling upon them, he
plundered them outside the mosque. Khishika Bi was then sent against him by the
khan and a major battle was fought which resulted in Anusha's defeat and in his

retreat to Miyankal,!4 accompanied by those of the Khitai Qipchaq who had taken ‘the
path of sedition and rebellion’.
It is at about this time that Subhan Quli sent an ambassador to Shah Sulaiman,

and, according to Kaempfer, the Bukharan ambassador was present when the
Swedish envoy Fabricius was received in audience on 30 July 1684. Kaempfer
dismisses this ambassador rather summarily. He describes him as just one of the
numerous visitors from ‘Usbecia’ who brought the Shah ‘insignificant’ gifts of
horses, camels, hides and rhubarb, together with general declarations of friendship
and good faith. He adds that in return for their paltry offerings these envoys hoped to
receive important gifts, to sell their goods, and also to be provided with food and
accommodation by the Shah.!5 Whether or not the main aim of these embassies was
indeed commercial, the Swedish physician and botanist was wrong to dismiss all their
gifts as insignificant. Rhubarb, for example, was a very valuable item which Iran re-

exported to its advantage.!© And this particular ambassador had two major tasks to
perform which had nothing to do with trade. He was to persuade Shah Sulaiman that
troops stationed near the Bukharan frontier should be withdrawn following the death
of Abi ’1-Mansir. He was also to let the Shah know that Anusha’s latest attack on
Bukhara had failed, just in case the Iranian monarch had been thinking of joining
forces with his Khwarazmian counterpart.
While Subhan Quli's ambassador was discharging his mission, however, Anusha
was securing a remarkable success in the khanate. His campaign is described in very
different terms and with very different emphasis by each of Subhan Quli's main
historians. Mirza Amin simply says that a detachment of Khitai Qipchaq joined

12 Khwajah Samandar, 90. Mirza Amin, 109a-b.
13 Khwajah Samandar, 90-94.
14 Not to Khwarazm. Mirza Amin, 109b-110b.
15 Kaempfer, 220-1, 238-9.
16 More about rhubarb and its uses below.

333

Subhan Quli

Anusha's troops and that, together, they took most of the towns of Miyankal , after
which they captured Samarqand on 5 Sha‘ban 1095/18 July 1684.17
Khwajah Samandar gives a far more detailed account of this campaign. He also
paints a poor picture of Subhan Quli whose prime concern seems to have been to keep
out of the fighting. According to this historian the expedition began when Anusha
came over with his army and made for Bukhara, once again in the company of
Khwajah Quli Bi. On hearing of his approach Subhan Quli sent for troops from
Balkh, Badakhshan, Andijan and Turkestan, and also asked his son Sadiq
Muhammad to come to his assistance. The enormous army thus gathered was placed
under the general command of Khishika Bi. Three amirs from Balkh and
Badakhshan - Muhammad Jan Bi Yiz, Muhammad Sa‘id Khwajah and Mahmud Bi
Qataghan - were put in charge of individual regiments, and the army set off to
intercept Anusha, while Subhan Quli went to Samarqand to await developments.
However, Anusha managed once again to foil Subhan Quli's plans. Hearing that
Khishika Bi and his army were barring the route to Bukhara, he altered course and
made instead for Samargqand via Nur, north-west of Samarqand.!8 When Subhan
Quli was told of the enemy's change of plan, he at once left Samarqand and rode to
Karmina, due west of this town. There (instead of offering to lead the defence against
Anusha) he asked his Council to consider which vilayet he should make for. And
when his Council apparently failed to come up with an answer, he resorted to prayer,
deciding, as a result, that he would go to Bukhara, in order to ‘find out about the
position of the poor and await events’.
Khwajah Samandar does not take the trouble to explain that preparing Samarqand
to withstand a siege presented a major problem, especially as all available troops had
been sent off with Khushika Bi. Nor does he explain that Subhan Quli's retreat to
Karmina was a wise move, Karmina being a well-fortified town which the governor
in fact managed to defend against Anusha. However, it seems that none of the amirs
who formed part of his quriltai favoured the idea of him staying in Karmina, and that
may be why he turned to prayer to decide what to do.
Another contemporary historian, Muhammad Badi‘ Samarqandi, goes into greater
detail about Subhan Quli's decision and throws a kinder light on the khan's
behaviour. He explains that the Council could not agree on what Subhan Quli should
do. Some of the councillors suggested that he return to Samarqand, but the Juibari
shaikhs and others strongly urged him to go to Bukhara. In the circumstances Subhan
Quli had no option but to seek higher guidance, and after a prayer session in Karmina
and another at a Naqshbandi shrine nearby he finally decided to go to Bukhara.!9
There is little doubt, however, that the khan's behaviour was less than heroic.
Even his courtier Mirza Amin cannot help dropping hints to this effect. He explains
twice, tongue-in-cheek, that on hearing of the enemy's approach the khan ‘took the
road of manliness’ and blessed his warriors before sending them off to the front! 29
But to return to Khwajah Samandar's account of the campaign. Shortly after
Subhan Quli had reached his decision Anusha besieged Karmina but failed to take the
17 Mirza Amin, 110b-la. See above for the reasons leading to the conclusion that the year in
question was 1095 and not 1096 as stated by Mirza Amin. Hajji Mir (301b, 303a-b) gives two
different years for the fall of the town, both 1096 and also 1095. On the other hand Qipchaq Khan
(280b) appears to favour 1094.
18 North-east of Karmina.

19 Khwajah Samandar, 95-99 and n.
20 Mirza Amin, 107a, 110a.

334

1681-1702

town. He then continued to Samarqand. On his arrival he offered to spare the town if
the people surrendered, and since Samarqand had been left unprotected by the khan
his offer was gratefully accepted. On 5 Sha‘ban 1095/18 July 1684 the town gates
were opened, flags were put up in his honour, and his name was mentioned in the
khutbah and sikka.?! Anusha remained in control of Samargand for several months.
While he was there he married a beautiful descendant of the famous Khwajah Ahrar
whose father, Khwajah Zaccharias, was in fact the shaikh al-Islam. Khwajah
Zaccharias is said by Khwajah Samandar to have arranged the match himself because
he had been greatly impressed by Anusha. Mirza Amin takes a very different view of
the matter. He writes that Anusha simply sent for the girl to gratify his lust, having
heard of her beauty from the traitor Khwajah Quli Bi. His high-handed action united
the Samarqandis against the tyrant, and they ‘pushed him off his throne to the

.22
ground’
Khwajah Samandar continues his account by explaining how, after Anusha took
Samargand, he allowed his men to ravage the countryside to a distance of 8 km
around the town. He went on to make a successful bid for Kesh/Shahrisabz, where
his “sweet words’ persuaded the people to give him the town. Encouraged by this
success, he tried a similar approach with the people of Qarshi, only to meet with total
failure. Not only was his offer was refused point blank, but his ambassadors were
actually put to death! Anusha also sent 4,000 men to pillage and rob the inhabitants of
nearby Kasan, but when Subhan Quli heard what they were doing, he sent a force of
200 under Muhammad Sa‘id Khwajah to deal with them and, despite their inferior
numbers, they gallantly engaged the Khwarazmians and put them to flight. Another
Khwarazmian force was defeated at Qarabagh in Miyankal, but the decisive battle of

the campaign took place near Dabusi,?3 which had been fortified by Khushika Bi and
where the greater part of the Bukharan forces had gathered. Anusha attacked, but after
much fierce fighting on both sides his men were defeated and retreated to Samarqand.
Anusha, however, did not acknowledge defeat. He made several more attempts to
seize Dabusi and he only gave up when he was told that a large Bukharan army under
two well-known amirs, Muhammad Rahim Bi and Allah Birdi Bi, was on its way.
Realising that ‘he would not be able to hold Samarqand for more than three months’
against this army, especially if it was reinforced by the various garrisons of the area,
Anusha entrusted Samargand to ‘the traitor Bik Quli Bi’ and made for Khwarazm.”4
On his way he camped at Ghujduwan, much to the concern of Subhan Quli, but not
for long. Before any Bukharan troops had a chance to engage him, Anusha had left
the khanate. A week later his appointee to Samarqand followed him with the
remainder of his troops, and ‘there were no Khwarazmians left in Ma wara’ al-

nahr’ .25
So much for Khwajah Samandar's account. Mirza Amin adds some interesting
footnotes. He mentions that the main weapons used at Dabusi were spears, swords,

and bows and arrows. He adds that Anusha approached Khushika Bi and tried to win
him over some time before the battle of Dabusi, only to have his offer indignantly

21 Yajji Mir (303a), Mirza Amin (110b) and Qipchag Khan (280b) all agree about the day and
month, although they differ about the year. Khwajah Samandar, 100, gives no date.

22 Khwajah Samandar, 99-100, 108. Mirza Amin, 11a.

23 Some five leagues east of Karmina.
24 This may have been the former governor of Samarqand, whose name is generally given as
Khwajah Quli Bi, or Khwajah Quli.

25 Khwajah Samandar, 101-112.
335

Subhan Quli

refused. Khishika Bi marched out of the town and fought with the greatest courage,
charging right into the middle of the enemy ranks, and forcing them to flee the

battlefield. Muhammad Sa‘id Khwajah and the parwanchi Mahmid Bi Qataghan are
mentioned as having taken part in the battle of Dabusi, but Mirza Amin says nothing
about the réle which they may have played in it, or indeed during the campaign as a
whole. Muhammad

Yusuf Munshi, who was living in Balkh, no doubt under the

close supervision of Mahmiad Bi, when he wrote his history, says that Subhan Quli
asked his patron for help after the fall of Samarqand, and that the amir crushed the
‘Urganchi’ at Ghujduwan in a lightning campaign which forced Anusha to abandon
Samargand and leave the khanate. However, as the writer seems to be confusing this

campaign with a subsequent one against Anusha's son, Arang, his evidence has
discarded.26 To return to Mirza Amin's account, he places Anusha's withdrawal
Samargand on 9 Dhii ’I-hijja/17 November 1684, or only four months after the
opened its doors to him, which means that, although Anusha's success

to be
from
town
was

impressive, it was also very short-lived.27
The danger from Khwarazm seemed to be over, at least for the time being. At this
stage, if we are to believe Khwajah Samandar, Subhan Quli sought no revenge
against those who had defected to Anusha. But it is difficult to believe that all the
defectors succeeded, like Qadi Badi‘, in buying their pardon with large bribes, or else
that the khan freely forgave all those who begged for forgiveness.28 On the other
hand, although Soviet historians insist that the khan showed the most savage cruelty
in his reprisals against the people of Samarqand,9 no confirmation of this has been
found in the accounts by his Court historians, who would have probably applauded
such measures. Nor are they referred to by Hajji Mir and Qipchaq Khan who were
living in India when they wrote their histories and could afford to be perfectly truthful
about events. In any case, whether or not he eventually punished the Samarqandis for
having accepted Anusha, Subhan Quli had two pressing matters to attend to first. He
had to chastise his son Sadiq Muhammad for failing to help him against Anusha. He
also had to inform Aurangzib that he had freed the second city of the khanate,
Samarqand, from Anusha.
Subhan Quli was concerned at the Emperor's total silence since he had taken over
the khanate. In view of their relations during his brother's reign, which had generally
been friendly, he had expected a message of congratulation from Aurangzib on his
accession, or at the very least some acknowledgement of his embassy of 1683. Could
it be that Aurangzib was waiting for an opportunity to invade? If so, it was important
to let him know that the khanate was once again under his control. Subhan Quli
therefore hastened to send the judge Mir ‘Abd al-Rahman Khwajah to Delhi with a
letter in which he announced the ‘pleasant news’ that Samargand had been relieved,
after falling the ‘victim of misfortune’ and being ‘trampled under by rebels’.3° Then
he prepared to leave for Balkh.
Fortunately, on his eastern borders relations with the Qazaqs were satisfactory, so
he felt confident that they would not take advantage of his departure to attack

26 Mirza Amin, 11ib. Muhammad Yisuf Munshi, 282b-3a.
27 Both Mirza Amin, 111b-3b and Hajji Mir, 303b, give the date of Anusha's withdrawal as 9 Dha

’I-hijja 1096/6 November 1685, but for the reasons outlined above it is assumed that the year in
question was 1095.

28 Khwajah Samandar, 102-3, 111.
29 Semenov, "O sredneaziatskoi bumage", 6.
30 Nizamutdinov, Iz istorii sredneaziatsko-indiiskikh otnoshenii, 96.

336

1681-1702
Samarqand. The Qazagq ruler, Tauka Khan, son of Jahangir, had caused him no

trouble so far. He was more interested in trying to reclaim the territory which he had
recently lost to the Sungar Qalmaq. Until 1681 Tauka's authority had apparently
extended over ten or eleven gorodki (towns or forts),3! all of which were situated
within 12 to 24 hours of each other, and which included the towns of Turkestan,

Sairam, Tashkent and Chimkent. In that year, however, he had antagonised the
Sungar chief Galdan by refusing to ‘join with him, and follow his (Buddhist) faith’.
The angry “Bushuktu Khan’ had taken up arms against him and, after storming eight
of these gorodki, he had razed them to the ground. Only Turkestan was still under
Tauka's control, and Tashkent had only been spared because the townspeople had
agreed to pay tribute to Galdan. Many prisoners had been taken at the time, including
Tauka's son, who

was sent under guard to Tibet where, according to Galdan's

envoys to Siberia, he was still living in 1691, ‘free and respected’ (sic), at the Dalai
Lama's.
The story of Galdan's success against Tauka may have been exaggerated, but he
certainly tried to take Sairam in 1681 and 1683 and he finally succeeded in storming
the town in 1684, after which he razed it to the ground. He had also captured Tauka's
son, so that at the time when Subhan Quli was planning his expedition to Balkh,
Tauka was primarily concerned with rebuilding Sairam and with obtaining the return

of his son and other captives.32
Before studying Subhan Quli's expedition against Balkh, one ought perhaps to try
and understand why Sadiq Muhammad failed to respond to his father's plea for help
against Anusha. To begin with the Prince had not ignored his father's summons. He
had gathered an army and, sending ahead a detachment of able swordsmen under

Muhammad Sa‘id Khwajah and other amirs,3> he followed with the remainder of the
army, arriving in Kelif in Sha‘ban/July 1684. There he stopped, thinking it best to
despatch spies to Bukhara and to await their report on the situation before proceeding
any further. So far his behaviour had been impeccable. He had acted swiftly in
gathering an army and was showing praiseworthy caution in trying to assess the
situation. He waited in Kelif for three or four weeks,>4 but when the spies returned
and told him that Samargand had opened its doors to Anusha and formally accepted
him as ruler, Sadiq Muhammad decided to give up his campaign, and returned to
Balkh. Realising that his father's predicament was serious, he simply abandoned him
to his fate, a remarkable decision for one who was energetic enough in dealing with
his own enemies. Subhan Quli had good cause to resent his son's behaviour, for it
seemed to be inspired by fear as well as selfishness, not what he might have expected
from one whom he had named Sadiq, i.e., ‘sincere friend’ and ‘true’. Fortunately for
the khan there were many officials in Balkh who did not share his son's views.
Some, like the naqib Muhammad Sa‘id Khwajah and the diwanbegi Muhammad Jan,
took a full part in the fight against Anusha,*° both before and after the fall of
Samargand. Others appear to have continued towards the capital even after the Prince
31 Gorodok (pl. gorodki) literally meant a fortified outpost, but this word was incorrectly used with
regard to places such as Turkestan and Tashkent, which were definitely towns.
32 Rumyantsev, 389, 407-9. Bartol'd, Sochineniya, Il, i, 98. Velyaminov-Zernov, Izsledovanie, Il,

380. Konkashpaev, 251, places the destruction of Sairam in 1685.

33 Khwajah Samandar, 96-97. Muhammad Yisuf Munshi, 282a. Mirza Amin, 109b, 111b.
34 Hajji Mir, 302a. Qipchaq Khan, 280b, says he spent a month on the shores of the Amu-Darya.
35 Qipchag Khan, 280b-1a, says that Muhammad Sa‘id Khwajah and Muhammad Jan went to help
Subhan Quli while his son was camping by the Amu-Darya.

337

Subhan Quli
decided to turn back.
Their decision infuriated the Prince, for it put him to shame. When he got back to
Balkh on 6 Ramadan/6 August 1684, he punished them by seizing their property,
putting their relatives in prison and expelling Muhammad Sa‘id Khwajah's father
from the province. He followed this by having two of his younger brothers executed
in order to prevent them from ever ‘sullying his reign by their wicked deeds’ and

instituted a reign of terror against all his father's would-be supporters.*¢
His behaviour united against him not only the amirs of Balkh, who had helped his
father against Anusha, but also the representatives of the religious class. They all
urged Subhan Quli to punish his son and the khan finally decided to take action, as
much to punish his son for his disobedience as to save the province from his tyranny.
Conscious that this was a matter of some urgency, he braved the rigours of winter,
setting off with his army before the end of November 1684. When he was told that
Subhan Quli was marching towards Balkh, Sadiq Muhammad became defiant.
Instead of trying to obtain his father's forgiveness, he began to prepare Balkh for a

siege.>7
In early December 1684, after crossing the Amu-Darya on rafts made of inflated
goatskins, Subhan Quli and his army arrived near Balkh.3® At this stage, and
probably because he knew that the citadel was virtually impregnable, Subhan Quli
tried to cajole his son into surrendering. He wrote urging Sadiq Muhammad to come
out of the citadel and visit him without fear of reprisals. In the letter which was

entrusted to one of the khan's librarians called Mirza Amin,?9 the young man was
also told that he could hope for mercy, as the khan's only (grown-up) son. But the
khan's message fell on deaf ears, for Sadiq Muhammad was terrified of his father's
wrath. He could not believe that he might be forgiven. Allowing himself to be egged
on by his advisers, he fortified the citadel and even put torches on the towers in order
to watch for any action from his father's camp. However, Subhan Quli was not to be
discouraged. He sent three more conciliatory messages to his son, and the fourth
message, which was taken, like the first and the second, by the librarian Mirza Amin,
at last secured the Prince's submission. On 24 Muharram 1096/31 December 1684,

five days after his father had reached Balkh, Sadiq Muhammad sent his amirs to beg
his father's pardon and came out to pay his respects. Then he invited his father into

the citadel.4°
Subhan Quli graciously accepted his invitation. He entered the town and after
36 Mirz4 Amin,
from Kelif)
Muhammad
Muhammad's

1 14a. Khwajah Samandar, 114-5. Qipchaq Khan, 280b-1a, adds that (on his return
Sadiq Muhammad got rid of Mahmid Bi Qataghan by sending him to Qunduz.
Yusuf Munshi, 282a-b, gives the names of the Princes executed during Sadiq
reign of terror as ‘Abd al-Ghani and ‘Abd al-Qaiyim.

37 Hajji Mir, 302a. Khwajah Samandar, 117. Mirza Amin, 113b, 114b, 116b. Muhammad Yasuf
Munshi, 284a.

38 Qipchag Khan (281b) and Muhammad Yisuf Munshi, 284b-5a, place the fall of the town on 15
Muharram 1096/22 December 1684. Hajji Mir, 302b, dates it 24 Muharram 1095, although it
would seem from the context that he probably meant 24 Muharram 1096/31 December 1684.
Mirza Amin, 116b, favours 24 Muharram 1097. Khwajah Samandar, 115-6, also seems to favour
1097, but gives no precise date for the fall of the town, except that it was some time before the
month of Hit/February when Subhan Quli left Balkh.

39 It is not clear whether this Mirza Amin was the author of the same name. According to Oleg
Akimushkin, it was a different person altogether. Qipchaq Khan, 281b, calls him Muhammad
Amin.

40 Mirza Amin, 116b-9b. Khwajah Samandar, 117-9. Muhammad Yasuf Munshi, 284b-5a. Haji
Mir, 302a-b. Qipchaq Khan, 28 1a-b. .

338

1681-1702

saying the Friday prayers in the mosque he went to the citadel with his son, taking the
precaution of leaving two officials, the parwanchi Tangri Birdi and the qush begi
Yeilaq, to guard the entrance. What happened next is difficult to disentangle from the
confused accounts of the various historians, but Khwajah Samandar's version of
events seems most likely to be correct. Apparently Subhan Quli was told on his way
to the Prince's palace that his son had sinister intentions towards him, whereupon the
warmth of his feelings towards Sadiq Muhammad cooled noticeably. When the Prince
saw the distinct change in his father's attitude, he rushed back to the doors of the
citadel, commandeered

a horse and despatched a servant out of town. This was

noticed with considerable alarm by Subhan Quli's officials. Fearing that he might be
sending for reinforcements in order to ambush his father, Tangri Birdi and the other
officials took prompt action. They surrounded Sadiq Muhammad, seized him and
took him to Subhan Quli, and the khan had him executed there and then, as a traitor.
So much for Khwajah Samandar's version. According to Mirza Amin, after
commandeering the horse the Prince tried to ride down the narrow streets of the

citadel after his father. His father's officials stopped him from doing so and disarmed
him, removing the dagger which he was carrying in his waistband. The Prince rushed
to his father to complain about them, but when the khan heard what had happened he
gave orders for him to be put to death, and this was done the following day.4!
The Prince's advisers were also put to death, but first they were flayed alive,
drawn, and quartered, in the hope that the severity of their punishment would deter
potential rebels. Having thus dealt with the rebellion Subhan Quli remained in Balkh
long enough to appoint a new governor for the province. The new governor was
Muhammad Jan Bi Yuz, who, despite some earlier hostility towards the khan, had
rallied to him, leading part of the Balkh contingent in the recent struggle against
Anusha.*2 Satisfied that Muhammad Jan and Mahmid Bi Qataghan, whom he sent to
Qunduz,43 would deal energetically with any trouble that might arise in Balkh and
Badakhshan, Subhan Quli left Balkh on 3 Rabi‘ I 1096/7 February 1685 and returned

to Bukhara.*4
Meanwhile, on hearing that Subhan Quli had taken his army to Balkh, Anusha
had gathered an army and invaded again, but by the time he reached a village called

Ajajag,4> some of his advisers turned against him. They had grown tired of fighting
and were bitterly disappointed with the outcome of the last expedition. Taking him
prisoner, they blinded him and offered the throne to his eldest son Khudaida, a young

41 Khwajah Samandar, 119-21. Mirzd Amin, 119b-20a. Hajji Mir, 302b, says the Prince was put to
death on 25 Muharram because his father had been told of his many misdeeds by the people of
Balkh. Muhammad

Yisuf Munshi, 285a-b, does not agree. According to him the Prince fell

seriously ill in prison and died there, three months after his father's arrival, despite efforts to save
him.
42 Khwajah Samandar, 97, 121. Muhammad Yisuf Munshi, 286a. Mirza Amin gives no name for

the new governor. Hajji Mir, 303a, believes that the new governor was Mahmud Bi Qataghan.
Qipchaq Khan, 281b-2a, says this was the ataliq Imam Quli Kilchi who was succeeded first by the
ataliq Jadum in late 1097/November 1686, and then by Muhammad Jan in 1101/after 15 October
1689.

43 Muhammad Yasuf Munshi, 286a, says Mahmid Bi was then already an ataliq at the time, but

according to Qipchaq Khan, 282a, he was only given the title of ataliq when he was appointed
governor of Balkh.
44 Mirza Amin, 121a. Khwajah Samandar, 121, places his departure in the month of Hut/February.
Muhammad Yusuf Munshi, 285a, gives no precise date for this, but says the khan spent 3
months in Balkh, which seems to indicate that he left in mid-Rabi‘I/21 March.

45 Not traced.

339

Subhan Quli

Prince who seems to have been so undistinguished that his reign is often passed over
by historians.46 The ‘kingmakers’ then sent an ambassador to Subhan Quli ‘with
countless gifts to indicate their submission, promising eternal obedience if forgiven’.
Subhan Quli, who was delighted to hear that Anusha was at last out of action,

hastened to send back gifts and messages of goodwill.47 And Anusha, who is said to
have gone on pilgrimage to Mecca, died in Tabriz on his way back.48
When Subhan Quli arrived in Bukhara he brought with him his seven-year-old
grandson, Muhammad Mugqim, son of his first appointee to Balkh, whose education
he was to supervise with the greatest care.49 Shortly after his return several
ambassadors arrived at his Court, one of whom may have brought Tauka's
congratulations on his recent successes. Others came from rulers further afield, a
gratifying proof that his fame had spread. Wafadar Khan had come all the way from
Delhi, other ambassadors had been sent by the Tsar, the ruler of Kashghariya and the
Torgout Ayuka. All of them, according to Hajji Mir, brought ‘infinite offerings and
promises and letters of sincere friendship’ and Subhan Quli treated them all with

‘infinite favours and answered (their rulers' messages) with great courtesy’
.>°
Of these embassies only that of Wafadar/Zabardast Khan is known about in any
detail, no further reference to the others having been found. However, the Muscovite
envoy is likely to have expressed the Regent Sophia's interest in developing mutual
trade and diplomatic links,5! and more than one motive can be suggested for the
Torgout embassy. Ayuka was then regarded as a mighty ruler. He was being wooed
by the rulers of Poland and Muscovy. He exchanged ambassadors with the Crimeans

and the Ottomans. He had even prevented the Sungar Galdan from camping where he
chose in Siberia. Conscious of his own importance, he had decided to attack Khiva
because this ‘khan of the Amu-Darya region’ 52 had failed to ‘pay tribute’ to him. He
had already asked the Don Cossacks for support in this undertaking and it is quite
possible that he invited Subhan Quli to provide troops, in view of the khan's recent
problems with Anusha. But it is just as likely that he had sent an ambassador to
Bukhara to ask for some sort of tribute or protection money in return for a promise

that he would not interfere with Bukharo-Muscovite relations.53
The motivation for the Kashghariyan embassy is less clear, however. The ruler of
Kasghariya, Muhammad Amin, had come to the throne about four years earlier. He
ruled under the tutelage of his powerful spiritual director, Khwajah Apaq, having
replaced his brother “Abd al-Rashid, who had been toppled and taken to the Altai as a
46 He is only mentioned by Mirza Amin and by Shir Muhammad. And when Arang announced his
accession to the tsars, he claimed to be the direct successor to his father and grandfather.
Materialy, 255.

47 Mirza Amin, 126b-7b, 171a. Khwajah Samandar, 112-3, says Anusha’ favourite son (no name
given) blinded him.

48 The date of his death is not known, but if he remained in Mecca till the end of the month of the
pilgrimage (Dhu ’I-hijja 1096/October 1685), then he must have died some time in 1097/late
1685-1686, aged about 54. Hajji Mir, 303b, names his successor as Arang, as does Muhammad
Yusuf Munshi (297a).
49 According to Teufel (258) the boy was born in 1090. This is confirmed by Hajji Mir, 317b, who
gives his age as 19 in 1109. But Muhammad Yusuf Munshi, 286b, makes the boy three years
younger.

50 Hajji Mir, 307b.
51 See A.I., V, 265-7 for instructions to this effect sent to the captain of the busa on his way to

Karagan in 1687.

52 ‘Dary'inskii Khan’.

53 Khodarkovskii, 18-20. D.A./., X, 385, Rumyantsev, 407.
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1681-1702

result of the combined efforts of the redoubtable khwajah and his Sungar ally,
Galdan. Perhaps Muhammad Amin had already begun to chafe under the khwajah's

tutelage and he was hoping, with Subhan Quli's help, to rid his country of its Sungar
overlords, and of the necessity of paying tribute to them. If so, he must have been
disappointed, for Subhan Quli sent neither troops nor even a return ambassador.54
But to return to Zabardast Khan, he was despatched by Aurangzib on 25 Rabi‘II
1096/31 March 1685 with a very friendly letter which is reproduced by Muhammad
Yusuf Munshi and Hajji Mir. He took a variety of gifts for the ruler of the khanate,
including a number of elephants said to be as quick as lightning, despite their
enormous size. Whether or not Aurangzib had earlier intended to attack Ma wara’ alnahr, he now took great pains to justify his delay in sending the customary letter of
congratulations after Subhan Quli's accession. He explained that he had meant to send
an envoy but had waited until the various crises in the province of Balkh had been
solved. After mentioning Iskandar's and Abi ’1-Mansir's short tenures of office, he

said that he had postponed his ambassador's departure on hearing that the routes to
Bukhara had become unsafe and that mutiny and disorders were rife during the period
of Muhammad Sadiq's rebellion. Now that this rebellion had been quashed he was
sending Zabardast Khan with congratulations and with instructions to find out the
details of (the latest) ‘great events’ in the khanate. He hoped that Subhan Quli would
write fully about them for it would give him ‘joy and satisfaction’. Aurangzib also
mentioned Anusha's recent attack on the khanate and his amirs' decision to submit to
Subhan Quli, thus showing remarkably precise and up-to-date knowledge of very
recent events in the khanate. This cannot have pleased Subhan Quli, for it showed far
too keen an interest in the internal affairs of Ma wara’ al-nahr, but he must have
congratulated himself for having let the Emperor know as soon as possible of the
failure of Anusha's campaign against the khanate in November 1684.
The Emperor's letter continued with a detailed account of his own recent
problems, all of which, he declared, had been solved satisfactorily. The Rana's

refusal to pay jizya (capitation tax) had been overcome. Aurangzib's rebel son,
Muhammad Akbar, had been driven into the mountains. And as for the rebel's
protector, Shivaji's son, he had lost most of his possessions and would soon be

‘removed from the earth’ altogether.>> Aurangzib also claimed to have won major
victories against the Qalmaq near Kashghar and against the kings of Jauda in Deccan.
His letter ended with a request for concerted action against Iran, as the “Qizilbash
rabble’ were interfering with pilgrims on their way to the Hijaz. Aurangzib urged
Subhan Quli to help in a holy war, for it would purify the mosques, bring “quiet and
happiness’ to the area, and also give ‘Islam... and the shari‘a ’ (i.e. both rulers)

control over Iran and Khurasan.°°
According to Manucci this request was the real reason for the embassy. Aurangzib
was afraid that the Shah ‘might seize the opportunity to make some attack on the
kingdom‘ while he was engaged in pursuing Muhammad Akbar. He wanted the ‘king
of Balkh’ to ‘take the field against (the Persians)’ if they should make any hostile
movement against India. In return he was prepared ‘not only to pay for all the
expenses’ of the expedition but also ‘to give the king of Balkh a reward’.
54 Ibid. Bartol'd, Sochineniya, VII, 187-8. Shah Mahmid, 244.
55 CHI, IV, 250-2, 259, 282-4. In fact it was not until February

1687 that Muhammad

Akbar

despaired of success and left India, and two more years went by before Shivaji's son Shambhuji
was captured and put to death. N.B. Shivaji himself had died in April 1680.

56 Saqi, 255. Hajji Mir, 308a-12a. Muhammad Yisuf Munshi, 292a-Sa.
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Subhan Quli

But Subhan Quli was in no hurry to respond to Aurangzib's suggestion. Although

pleased that the Emperor had at last recognised his accession, he was indignant that a
special envoy, Khwajah Aba ’1-Ma’ani, should have been sent with Zabardast Khan
to take money for the guardians of Tamerlane's tomb in Samarqand. He resented
both the implication that the tomb was being neglected, and also the Emperor's failure
to broach the subject tactfully in his letter. He at first refused to let Khwajah Abu ’1Ma‘ani go to Samarqand. It took all of Zabardast Khan's persuasive skill to make
Subhan Quli relent, and he only did so after several interviews with the ambassador.
However, when Abi ’]-Ma‘ani at last arrived in Samargand his money was refused
by the guardians of the Gar-i Amir, presumably on the khan's instructions. Abu ’1Ma‘ani had to find another good cause to support in Samarqand, and this took time.
Finally he gave the money to one of the local shrines, as directed by the khan, and he

was sent back to India.57
Abi ’1-Ma‘ani and Zabardast Khan were kept nearly three years in the khanate.
They appear to have been dismissed together in.the spring of 1688, just before
Subhan Quli set off on a second expedition to Balkh, where trouble had flared up
again.°8 The exact nature of this trouble is not known. Qipchaq Khan says cryptically
that the khan spent three months in the town from Tir/June-July ‘sorting things out’.
Mirza Amin is not very clear, and hardly more*explicit. He says that Subhan Quli set
off towards Balkh, but also mentions that he summoned the nagib Sa‘id Khwajah
(from Balkh?) and the ataliq Nizam al-Din Jawim Bi (from Qarshi?) to Court.5? They
‘advised (him) to spend a few days in Balkh’, whereupon the khan ‘set off for Balkh
without hesitation’ (sic). The most satisfactory account of the khan's reasons for
undertaking this particular expedition comes from Muhammad Yusuf Munshi. He

explains that complaints had been made against the governor, Muhammad Jan, whose
behaviour had been unfair and unjust.
Before setting off for Balkh Subhan Quli sent an army to the eastern provinces to
settle a difference with Tauka and to put down the rebellion of a certain Urus Sultan,
who had seized the fort of Bishkent/Pskent. Khishika Bi, the amir who had defeated
Anusha four years earlier, was appointed to lead this army. They were despatched on
10 Rajab/11 May 1688 and shortly afterwards, knowing that Khishika Bi was well
able to deal with the complexities of the situation, Subhan Quli left the capital. Little is
known about Khishika Bi's campaign, but it seems that he had some difficulty
retaking Pskent, for he was still in the eastern provinces when Subhan Quli returned

to Bukhara.®!
Subhan Quli arrived in Balkh on 30 Rajab/31 May. He was warmly welcomed by
the governor and the people, and he stayed there ‘three months and eleven days’.
When he left for the capital on 10 Dhi ’1-qa‘da/6 September 1688, he had apparently
solved all the local problems. Whether he had done so by remonstrating with
Muhammad Jan, or by appointing Jadum Bi in his place,®3 Subhan Quli felt so

57 Snag II, 254. Muhammad Badi‘, IVAN UZB no. 2727, listy 155b, 155b-6a; LOIVAN, listy

58 bid. Muhammad Yisuf Munshi, 295b.
59 These officials were probably Muhammad Sa‘id Khwajah and the governor of Qarshi, Javam Bi,
(Mirza Amin, 122a) whom Qipchaq Khan calls Jadum Bi.

69 Qipchaq Khan, 281b. Mirza Amin, 128b-9a. Muhammad Yisuf Munshi, 295b.
61 Mirza Amin, 128b. Khwajah Samandar, 122-5.
62 Mirza Amin, 130a-la.

63 Mirza Amin says nothing about a change of governor, but Muhammad Yiasuf Munshi, who began

his history in 1697-8, or nine years after the events in question, says that Muhammad Jan was

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1681-1702

confident that there would be no further problem in the province that he did not
hesitate, a few weeks after his return to Bukhara, to request troops from Balkh for an

expedition to Khurasan.
The khan had decided to attack Khurasan for a variety of reasons. Firstly he
would appear to be showing solidarity with Aurangzib, whose son Muhammad Akbar
had found asylum in Iran early in 1688. And since the Emperor was too occupied in
the Deccan to join in a punitive expedition against the Shah, there would be no need to
share either the glory or the spoils with him. In any case, if, as claimed by Manucci,
Aurangzib had offered to meet the cost of the Bukharan campaign, Subhan Quli could

only gain by it.
Secondly the campaign would provide him with an opportunity to take revenge
upon Shah Sulaiman, who had slighted him by failing to respond to his embassies
and by making no attempt to congratulate him on his accession, although seven years
had elapsed since then. Thirdly, as peace had reigned for several years on the border
with Khurasan, the province would be unprepared for hostilities, and his expedition

would have the advantage of surprise.®5
Fourthly, a particularly important consideration was the rich booty that would be
taken during the campaign. Some of it could be distributed to Subhan Quli's amirs
and thus strengthen their allegiance to the throne. The rest would help to fill his
seriously depleted Treasury without causing further damage to his popularity. His
recent expedients, such as reducing the silver content of the tanga to an all-time low of
25%, and demanding sevenfold payments of taxes from his subjects every year, were
very unpopular. Together with the exactions of unscrupulous officials, they had
seriously impoverished his people. Many were abandoning their lands, causing a

reduction in the income accruing to the khan from taxes.6© Subhan Quli's financial
situation was so serious that it could only be helped by a successful expedition.
The thought that it would leave Bukhara virtually unprotected because the
remainder of the army under Khishika Bi were still occupied in the eastern provinces,
ought to have given the khan cause for some concern. But Subhan Quli felt confident
that his Khwarazmian neighbours would not take advantage of the situation to attack.
There had been no trouble from that quarter for three years. Anusha's sons seemed to
have little interest in continuing their family's feud with the Ashtarkhanids. Khudaida
had lived at peace with the khanate during a short reign which lasted between two and
three years, and his seventeen-year-old brother Arang, who had recently taken over
after having him put to death, seemed more interested in a life of pleasure than in

raiding his neighbours.®7
replaced by ‘Jadhum’ Bi before Zabardast Khan left the khanate to return to India. On the other
hand Qipchag Khan (281b), as mentioned above, places Muhammad Jan's appointment after the
death of Jadum, and not before 1101/October 1689.
64 Muhammad Yasuf Munshi, 297b, says Subhan Quli attacked in pursuance of the agreement made
with Zabardast Khan. CHI, IV, 284. Manucci, Storia, I, 254-5.

65 Mirza Amin, 131b. Qipchaq Khan, 282a, says Subhan Quli intervened on behalf of the pilgrims
from the khanate, who were being robbed on their way through Iran.
66 Chekhovich, Dokumenty, 66-88. The silver content of the tanga would go down even further (to
22.5%) in 1100/1689 and would not be raised in the next few years, as shown by a deed of
1106/1695. See Davidovich, Istoriya, 92, for coins with only 25% silver dated 1091/1680-1, and

1099/1687-8. For the general situation in the khanate see Abdul Ghani, Sayyido Nasafi, 15;
Khwajah Samandar, 103-4, 133; Mukhtarov, Materialy, 26.

67 Shir Muhammad, 455-6, gives no dates for Arang/Ernek's accession, but says Khudaida reigned

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Subhan Quli
The armies which set off for Khurasan totalled between 200,000 and 300,000
men and consisted of a Bukharan contingent led by the diwanbegi Gha’ib Nazar Bi
Sarai, plus a Balkh contingent under the naqgib Muhammad Sa‘id Khwajah. The
campaign was a total success. Its main achievement was the capture, in Rabi‘T 1 100
(between 24 December 1688 and 23 January 1689), of the fortress and town of Bala

Murghab which had been threatening Jijektu and Maimana. The siege was conducted
with mathematical precision, several points being taken on the circumference of the
town before a breach was made in the outer walls of the citadel. At this stage the
governor, ‘Abdallah Sultan, begged for mercy and gave himself up. This was a
significant achievement for ‘Abdallah Sultan's father was himself an important
official, variously described as the governor of Maruchagq or the governor of Herat.
Further successes followed. No less than 20 other fortresses were taken and their
governors captured. When the army returned to Ma wara’ al-nahr in Safar
1101/November 1689,8 leaving Adina Muhammad Bi Ming in charge of Bala
Murghab with several of his followers, the men took back large numbers of captives,
plus horses, camels and an estimated 100,000 sheep.®?
Subhan Quli had been wrong to count on Khwarazmian neutrality during the
expedition to Khurasan, for, as soon as Arang found out that the khanate was
defenceless, he attacked. Little is known about this campaign, except that the
Khwarazmian monarch was forced to abandon it because the Torgout Ayuka similarly
took advantage of his absence to attack Khwarazm. Despatching an ambassador to
Muscovy in Rajab 1100/21 April-21 May 1689, Arang asked him to inform the Tsars
Ivan and Peter that their vassal Ayuka and his followers had caused much destruction
in the undefended ‘Khivan yurt’. They had also taken some 3,000 prisoners while he
was warring in the khanate, and he hoped that in view of this the new Tsars would

‘order their close advisers to make war on Ayuka's ulus’ .7°
The scale of Arang's attack on the khanate is not known, nor is it clear whether he
got as far as Bukhara, as claimed by Muhammad Yusuf Munshi, who says that his
patron, the ataliq Mahmid Bi, saved the capital.”7! However that may be, there is no
doubt that the Qalmaq attack greatly contributed towards saving the khanate. It is
therefore tempting to assume that Subhan Quli had colluded with the Qalmag chief,
letting him know that Khwarazm was bezlyudnoi, i.e., empty or warriorless.

for two years. Mirza Amin, 171a, confirms that Arang killed his brother. Materialy, 255. Arang
only announced his accession to the rulers of Muscovy in Rajab 1100/April-May 1689. See
further about the possible date of Khudaida's death and Arang's accession in the "Annotated tables
of rulers" below.
68 Mirza Amin, 132b, says Gha’ib Nazar Bi was back in Bukhara with his prisoner, the governor of

Bala Murghab, on 15 Safar. He does not indicate the year in question and although from the
context it would appear to be 1100, that cannot be so because, according to Subhan Quli himself,
the town fell in Rabi‘I 1100 (after 24 December 1688), i.e. after Safar 1100.

69 Khwajah Samandar, 126-32. Mirza Amin, 131b-2b. Nizamutdinov, K istorii sredneaziatskoindiiskikh otnoshenii, 100, 102. Muhammad Yusuf Munshi, 297b, writes that the expedition
against Bala Murghab was led by Khushika Bi. Qipchaq Khan, 282a, places the fall of Bala
Murghab three years later, in 1103/1691-2 and says that the army of the khanate marched to
Sistan and Kerman in the south-east and (then) to Jam and Bakharz, taking 32 fortresses
altogether.
70 Materialy, 257. TsGADA
people, nation.

fond 134, op.1, 1689-91 kn.3, list 125a,Ulus/alis means tribe,

71 Muhammad Yisuf Munshi, 297b, perhaps intentionally, appears to be confusing this campaign
with another, several years later, in which his patron did cover himself with glory.

344

1681-1702

Once the Khwarazmian danger had passed, Subhan Quli wrote to Aurangzib to
announce his army's success in Khurasan. In a first letter, sent with the dadkha Nadir

Bi, he referred, in a roundabout way, to Aurangzib's suggestion that they undertake a
joint holy war against the Shi‘a. Having come to the same conclusion as the Emperor,
he said, and being aware that Aurangzib could not take action because of his internal
difficulties with ‘ungrateful ones’, he had decided to act alone. His army had taken
Bala Murghab and 20 other fortresses. He was sending over Nadir Bi, who had been
in Khurasan at the beginning of the campaign, in order to strengthen their friendly
links. He also expressed the hope that his ambassador would be quickly sent back.
Nadir Bi was received by Aurangzib on 1 Ramadan 1101/8 June 1690, at the
same time as an ambassador from Istanbul and one from Kashghar. This is recorded
by Musta‘idd Khan, but he gives scant details about these embassies. He says that the
three ambassadors were treated equally and seems to suggest that they were dismissed
without delay. He adds that each of them was given jewels, ‘precious goods’ and a
letter to take back to his ruler, together with precious jewels, a horse, an elephant,

money and the customary robe for himself.72
Nadir Bi was also briefed by the Emperor as to the reason why he had been
unable to launch a simultaneous.campaign, as planned, against Iran. The ambassador
explained to Subhan Quli on his return to the khanate that Aurangzib had been obliged
to deal with the ‘rebellions’ of Abi ’1-Hasan of Golkonda and Sikandar/Iskandar of
Bijapur, both of whom had ‘strayed from obedience to him owing to the instigation of
the ruler of Iran’. In fact Aurangzib's armed confrontation with the armies of Bijapur
and Golconda had resulted from his own religious and territorial ambitions, and not
from any direct provocation by Sikandar or Abia ’I-Hasan. Even before his accession
he had been tempted by the enormous wealth of both states, attacking them on
spurious grounds, and since then he had welcomed every opportunity to intervene on
behalf of rival factions during Sikandar's minority. The fact that both Bijapur and
Golconda had temporarily supported, first his enemy Shivaji and then Shivaji's son,
gave Aurangzib a good pretext for attempting to annex both states. There were also
religious reasons for his animosity against the ‘Adil Shahis of Bijapur and the Qutb
Shahis of Golconda. Both dynasties were of the Shi‘a persuasion, and as such they
constituted an ‘heretic’ enclave on Indian soil which the pious Emperor was
determined to eradicate. Furthermore, Abi ’l-Hasan's Brahmin ministers had been
persecuting the Sunnis of Golconda. Above all, the Emperor was determined to seek
revenge upon Abi ’1-Hasan for writing, in a letter that had been intercepted, that
Aurangzib was ‘a mean-minded coward for attacking a helpless young orphan like
Sikandar 'Ali Shah.’
Since the summer of 1681 Aurangzib had therefore concentrated all his forces in
the Deccan. He had gone there himself in order to supervise operations and had
achieved a great measure of success by the time he received Nadir Bi in audience in
June 1690. Bijapur had been annexed in October 1686 and Golconda in October
1687. Sikandar had entered the Emperor's service and Abu ’l-Hasan had been
committed to the prison where he would spend the rest of his days. As for Shivaji's
son Shambhuji, he had been tortured and put to death in February 1689. By
December 1689 his capital city had fallen to the Mughals and most of his relatives
were in the Emperor's hands. Nevertheless Aurangzib was not yet fully satisfied, and
he did not feel that he was free to contemplate the idea of foreign conquest. He was
72 Nizamutdinov, K istorii sredneaziatsko-indiiskikh otnoshenii, 100. Saqi, 337.

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Subhan Quli
determined to eliminate Maratha resistance altogether, this being centred round
Shambhuji's younger brother Raja Ran and the virtually impregnable headquarters of
Gingei in the south-east. The Emperor also wanted ‘to take possession of the rich and
boundless dominions of the fallen ‘Adil Shahi and Qutb Shahi kingdoms’ and it was
because of these ambitious schemes that he was unable to undertake any military

operations against Iran.73
In the circumstances Aurangzib must have been particularly pleased that Subhan
Quli had attacked Iran, and no doubt he must have hoped that the Bukharan ruler
would continue to weaken his enemy. Whether or not he suggested a second attack on

Khurasan, and whether or not this suggestion reached the khan in time,’4 this attack
took place in the autumn of 1690. Some time before the expedition began Subhan
Quli sent another letter to the Emperor, this time with Shah Bik Bi. He again
mentioned the conquest of Bala Murghab, and said that Shah Bik Bi had taken part in
this ‘holy war’ and therefore knew all about it in detail. He also referred to
Aurangzib's ‘holy war’ in India as part of their joint effort to clear the Shi‘a from the
earth. The purpose of this letter seems to have been threefold: the khan wanted to
acknowledge the message sent back with Nadir Bi, to strengthen their mutual alliance,
and above all to prompt Aurangzib to send the promised subsidy. This would have
been particularly welcome after the summer of 1100/1689 which had dried up the
crops to the detriment of men and beasts, causing the peasants to flee the land en

masse, and thus further reducing the khan's revenue from taxation.7> But Aurangzib
was too busy with his own warring schemes to send either a return embassy, or any
money. The second expedition to Khurasan was therefore undertaken without his
help.
Once again the campaign was partly motivated by the expectation of booty and
fame. Subhan Quli could also have been responding to a letter from Istanbul in which
he was asked for support in a projected attack on Iran. In the wake of two major
defeats, at Vienna in 1683 and at Buda in 1686, the Ottomans had decided to abandon
their search for glory at the expense of the Firangi. Sulaiman II, who came to the
throne in November 1687, reverted to the traditional policy of fighting Iran in alliance
with the ruler of Bukhara. However, because of the long period that had elapsed since
the two countries had made contact, his letter of Dht ’1-hijja 1099 (between 27
September and 26 October 1688) was wrongly addressed to Subhan Quli's brother
“Abd al-'Aziz. When Subhan Quli replied, he of course pointed out the Sultan's
mistake. He also took the opportunity to mention his own army's recent success in
the fight against Iran which he was hoping to repeat, and in the anticipation of further

success he despatched his army to Khurasan.76
The army which left Bukhara on 29 Dhi ’1-hijja 1101/3 October 1690 and which
according to Qipchag Khan was 100,000 strong, had allegedly been given the task of
dealing with ‘rebellion and corruption’ in the area of Marw, and of preventing further
73 Hajji Mir, 312b. CHI, IV, 253, 255, 274-7, 286-9. Smith, 420-2.

74 If Nadir Bi was dismissed shortly after his arrival in India, i.e., in June 1690, then he might have
had a chance to deliver the Emperor's message in time.

75 Nizamutdinov, 102-3, places this embassy much later, after Mahmid Bi Qataghan had been

appointed governor of Balkh and Badakhshan and had fallen out with Subhan Quli, i.e. in about

1696, but it seems unlikely that Subhan Quli would have written to announce a victory which
occurred seven years earlier, unless, of course, he was still waiting for the promised subsidy from

Aurangzib. Khwajah Samandar, 133-4.
76 Anon. Royal letters, 19a. Abd al Rahim, Mughal diplomacy, 161, wrongly dates this letter
1098.
5

346

1681-1702

interference with the caravans of pilgrims on the way to the Hijaz. The commander of
the expedition, the capable and experienced Khashika Bi, was duly blessed by
Subhan Quli before he set off on his praiseworthy mission. There were even several
days of celebration in his honour at Chahar Jay. When he arrived at Marv he had little
trouble in seizing the outer fortifications of the town. His men were then allowed to
plunder, some of the inhabitants were killed, others were taken prisoner and the siege

train was put into place. But the siege of the citadel was to prove a disappointment,
for the Iranian governor had had time to make his own preparations and was
determined to fight back energetically. He managed to foil two Bukharan attempts to
storm the citadel, seized a number of Bukharan prisoners and soon retook one of the
nearby forts. After the second unsuccessful assault Khishika Bi realised that the
citadel was going to be ‘impossible to take’ without a lengthy siege. As he had not
been sent to conquer Khurasan, but rather to warn the local people that they would be
punished if they attacked Bukharan pilgrims and traders, and also to take booty, all of
which had been achieved quite effectively, he decided to raise the siege. And he
returned to the khanate where he arrived on 2 Safar 1103/25 October 1691.77
During 1103 (September 1691-September 1692) a second ambassador from
Turkey arrived in Bukhara.78 Mustafa Shawish came on behalf of a new Sultan,
Ahmad II, with a letter which was correctly addressed to Subhan Quli, the khan's
recent message to Istanbul having evidently reached the Ottoman capital by then. In
this letter, written shortly after his accession, Ahmad II began by answering Subhan
Quli's missive. He was pleased to hear that the khan was in good health and that he
had such ‘sincere aims and pure motives’, an allusion no doubt to Subhan Quli's
determination to fight the Shi‘a of Iran. The Sultan then sought to justify his own
country's recent inaction with regard to Iran. Although he himself and his ancestors
had always ‘felt that the best way to serve Allah was to clear the earth (both) of the
Firangi infidels and the Qizilbash heretics’ they had been forced to put off the latter
task so far, in order to deal first with the “Frankish infidels.’
This had been done in several stages. To begin with, after many battles, the whole
of the Ottoman territory had been cleared of Franks, several of whose Princes and
generals had been taken prisoner. Next a Frankish attack on Uzjan had been
repelled.”? This was followed by a successful Ottoman counter-attack which forced
the Franks in question to offer their submission and to promise that they would

remain at peace with Turkey, a promise which they duly honoured.8° Some time
later, however,

‘other Franks’ invaded the Ottoman Empire, but the local people,

without help from the Ottoman army, managed to defeat them and to take ‘most of
their amirs and weapons’. The Sultan's army then pursued and routed the remainder
of the assailants, and their territories were annexed. Now (at last) Ahmad II was free
to ‘clear the Qizilbash from the face of the earth’. He would be sending a large army
to the frontiers of Iran in the near future and would let Subhan Quli know as soon as
77 Mirza Amin,132b-4a. Qipchagq Khan, 281b-2a, places this campaign before the one to Bala
Murghab, but he says nothing about the siege of Marv and he claims that nearly 15 villages were
plundered in the vicinity of Mashhad and Nishapur before the amir returned to the khanate with
much booty.
78 Even if the ambassador had been despatched in 1102, as claimed by Muhammad Yusuf Munshi,
i.e. within three months of Ahmad II's accession, he cannot have arrived in the khanate before

1103.
79 Uzjan has not been found.
80 This may have been a reference to Golitsyn's disastrous campaigns against Crimea in 1687 and

1689, after which there were no more attacks from Muscovy until 1695.

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Subhan Quli

it got there. He asked the khan, as the ruler of a country long famous for its scholars
and religious men, to fight with him for ‘the triumph of the Prophet's law’. And he
hinted at the advisability of a unified command for their joint armies, which ought to
be ‘as one body and soul’ in their task of destroying the enemies of the faith, who
were as thorns and fallen branches on the plains of Iran.
The wealth of detail and friendly tone of the Sultan's letter are bound to have
flattered Subhan Quli. No doubt he was also pleased with the rich assortment of gifts
which were delivered with the letter and which apparently included Arab horses,
precious stones, multi-coloured materials and ‘all things suitable for a great monarch’.
There is little doubt that the ruler of the khanate was by then known far and wide,
for in the same year two other embassies arrived in Bukhara. One was from
Kashghariya, the other was from a country which Muhammad Yusuf Munshi calls
‘Qrim’ explaining that this was (not Crimea but) a dependency of China, inhabited by
Muslims as well as worshippers of many gods. The Muslims of Qrim wanted Subhan
Quli to know that, following a recent clash with their idol-worshipping neighbours,
they had read the khutbah in his name. Similarly the ambassador from Kashghariya
announced that Muhammad Amin had begun to read the khutbah and to coin in the
khan's name. He also asked his chosen suzerain for help against the ‘infidel’ Qirghiz,

who were tightening their hold on Kashghar.®!
All this attention from far-flung countries was of course gratifying, but Subhan
Quli was in no hurry to commit himself to further fighting, either in Iran or in
Kashghariya. He kept all the ambassadors in the khanate for nearly a year, during
which time his relations with Iran improved considerably. When he dismissed
Mustafa Shawish,®2 he sent with him an ambassador, Mu’min Bi Yabi, whose task
was to explain to the Sultan why Subhan Quli was no longer able to take action
against Iran. Subhan Quli's change of heart had come about as the result of a recent
initiative by Shah Sulaiman. He had written to Subhan Quli, reminding him that peace
had reigned between his predecessors and each of the Ashtarkhanids in turn, starting
with Baqi Muhammad. He had also sent a large number of presents to the khan and
asked for the resumption of the good relations which their two countries had
previously enjoyed. In the circumstances, although the peaceful and friendly relations
referred to had mostly been of a temporary nature, Subhan Quli had felt bound to
follow the example of his ancestors and to make peace with Iran. He had therefore
ordered his amirs to conduct no further raids on ‘Qizilbash’ land.83
Subhan Quli does not appear to have sent a return embassy to Kashghariya, and
in the light of subsequent events he was wise not to get involved in the affairs of this
very unsettled country. From the evidence available it seems that Muhammad Amin
tried to get rid of his Qalmaq overlords. Not surprisingly this met with the
disapproval of his sponsor, Khwajah Apaq, who was anxious to retain the support of

his allies, the Qalmaq, and their chief Galdan. Khwajah Apaq accordingly took up
arms against him. He refused to be placated by all subsequent attempts at conciliation,
and Muhammad Amin was forced to flee Yarkand. But he was captured soon after
and he was put to death either before the end of 1103/11 September 1692 or in early
1104. Within three years three different rulers had followed him on the throne of
Kashghariya: Khwajah Apaq, Khwajah Yahya, and his own brother, Muhammad
81 Anon. Royal Letters, 35a-36a. Muhammad Yisuf Munshi, 300b-3a. Mirza Amin, 134a.

82 This seems to have been just before Subhan Quli's third expedition to Balkh, which began in

Jumada I 11041/January 1693. Mirza Amin, 134a. Khwajah Samandar, 135.

83 Mirza Amin, 134b. Hajji Mir, 305a, 307b.

348

1681-1702

Mu’ min, also known as Aqbash Khan.84
Meanwhile Subhan Quli's relations with the Qazaqs had improved to such an
extent that, thinking this would give him pleasure, Tauka sent him the heads of ten

Muscovites in 1692-3,85 together with two Muscovite captives. But although the
Bukharan ruler allowed the heads to be hung up on the gallows in the capital, he
refused to take the captives, saying that he did not want to risk antagonizing the Tsar.
With Khwarazm, on the other hand, Subhan Quli's relations seem to have remained

strained, for Arang refused to let a party of Muscovite merchants go through his

country to the khanate in 1691.86
On 5 Jumada I 1104/12 January 1693 Subhan Quli set off on his third expedition
to Balkh. The reasons for this expedition are not clear, although it would seem that

the khan wanted to assert his authority and to curb the ambition of Mahmid Bi
Qataghan. Qipchaq Khan explains that for over a year Mahmid Bi, who had been
appointed to Qunduz, had been trying to take over the whole of Badakhshan, and
since the overall governor of Balkh and Badakhshan, Muhammad Jan, had become
blind, there was a real danger that he might succeed. The khan therefore marched to

Balkh in the depth of winter, despite the intense cold which covered his warriors'
beards with hoar-frost and made them look like eggs! He was warmly welcomed at
Qarshi, where rich materials were spread in the streets and plentiful supplies were
made available for the remainder of his journey.
However, at this stage the khan received an unpleasant piece of news. Two of his
officials, Shah Khwajah and Khwajam Yar Bi Ming,87 had rebelled and seized
Shahr-i sabz. He despatched a certain Tughma Bi Yabi to deal with them and
continued on his way, entering Balkh on 23 Jumada 1/30 January together with
Muhammad Jan, the nagib Muhammad Sa‘id Khwajah, and all the ‘ulama’ and mullas
of Balkh, who had come some distance out of town to meet him. Subhan Quli now
tried to prevail upon Mahmid Bi Qataghan to come to Balkh, but the wily amir made
one excuse after another. Even after Muhammad Jan and Muhammad Sa‘id Khwajah
went to see him in Qunduz as requested, he still declined to come, allegedly out of
fear of the khan. Finally he promised that he would ‘come and submit’ after the
khan's army returned to Bukhara, and Subhan Quli had to be satisfied with this

promise. He remained in Balkh, however, for the rest of the winter and, hoping that
he had indeed cowed the amir into submission, he returned to Bukhara in the spring
of 1693.88
That autumn Mahmid Bi had occasion to demonstrate his renewed loyalty to the
khan by taking a major part in quashing the rebellion of the ishik aqasi Bik
Muhammad. Bik Muhammad had entrenched himself in Shahr-i sabz, having rebelled
out of jealousy for the qish begi Yeilaq, who was preferred by the khan. Subhan Quli
summoned the amirs of Bukhara and Balkh to Qarshi, and then began to gather an
army. But the amirs of Balkh were slow in responding to his summons. This was
84 For further details about the succession in Kashghariya based on Muhammad Sadiq Kashghari and

on ms. 590. oi, see Bartol'd, Sochineniya, VIII, 187-9. See also Akimushkin, "Khronologiya".
85 D.A.L, X, 383, 387. This is the figure given in his report by one of the Muscovite envoys who
visited Tauka in 1695, but another envoy, Kobyakov, was told that 20 heads were sent to the
khan some time between September 1692 and September 1693.
86 Materialy, 259.
87 Qipchag Khan, 282a. Khwajah Samandar, 135-9. Mirza Amin, 134b-5b, calls the second rebel

Khwajam Yar Bi Minghar.

88 Mirza Amin, 136a-8a. Khwajah Samandar, 139-41.

349

Subhan Quli

because they had fallen out with the diwanbegi Yar Muhammad

Ming and had

attempted to put him to death.89 Although the diwanbegi managed to escape to
Samarqand, the conflict had greatly delayed the amirs' departure. In fact they were

still on their way to Qarshi when Mahmid Bi, who had come all the way from

Qunduz with a number of his Qataghan tribesmen in answer to the khan's summons,
chanced upon them. He was thus able to take part in their council of war and it was
decided that if Bik Muhammad refused to see the error of his ways Shahr-i sabz
would be stormed.
Mahmid Bi and two other experienced campaigners, the naqib Muhammad Sa‘id
Khwajah and Gha’ib Nazar Bi were put in charge of the military operations, while a
number of others went to parley with Bik Muhammad. When the three designated
amirs and their troops arrived near Shahr-i sabz a delegation from the surrounding
forts and villages at once came to meet them and ‘put the ring of obedience in their
ear’. But Bik Muhammad himself refused to listen to reason. Realising that he was
losing local support and fearing the khan's anger, he fled southwards to Qubadiyan.
The amirs then reported to the khan at Chahar Jay, taking Mahmud Bi along with
them and he made his peace with Subhan Quli. Five days later, on 6 Rabi‘II 1105/5
December 1693, the khan rewarded him for
services by appointing him ataliq and

governor of Balkh.9°
Mahmud Bi was delighted with his prestigious new post. But less than eighteen
months later his ruthless and domineering manner had got him into difficulty with his
subordinates, and even with the khan. At first the khan had relied upon Mahmid Bi.
Thus, six months after his nomination as governor, another major rebellion broke out
in the khanate and Subhan Quli at once turned to Mahmud Bi for help. This rebellion,
which apparently began on 27 Shawwal 1105/21 June 1694, was led by a number of
highly-placed officials: - the diwanbegi Fadil Yaz who had recently been governor of
Samargand, two parwanchi, namely Uz Timir Qataghan and Taghma Bi Yabi, and

the mir akhir Khishhal Bi.9!
Although this rebellion is widely documented and mentioned by several
contemporary sources, only Mirza Amin gives some idea of its cause. He says that
the rebels asked for the dadkha Khwajam Berdi to be sent forthwith on pilgrimage,
i.e. they wanted the khan to dismiss him. When the khan resisted their suggestion,
they took up arms against him. Thus jealousy triggered off the rebellion, just as
jealousy for the qush begi Yeilaq had caused Bik Muhammad to rebel less than a year
earlier. However, the bitterness of the conflict that followed appears to suggest that
theirs was no ordinary jealousy. It was based on very practical considerations. At a
time of economic difficulties and widespread bribery, it may be that officials could
only survive by establishing a suitable rapport with the khan's favourites and in
particular with the official who handed petitions to him, as gifts and valuable offices
could be obtained through him alone. In the circumstances Subhan Quli's attempts to
pacify them with (minor?) gifts and favours could not succeed. Twice he sent
emissaries to parley with the rebels outside Bukhara, but they would not listen, even
89 It is not clear whether the diwanbegi was the same person as Khwajam Yar Bi Ming, who had
earlier rebelled against the khan.

90 Mirza Amin, 138b-9b.

9! See glossary for the duties of these various officials. Mirza Amin, 140a. Qipchaq Khan, 282b.
Mukhtarov, Materialy, 29. Khwajah Samandar, 142, places the rebellion a year later, and says
that Gha’ib Nazar Bi joined the rebels, but Mirza Amin writes that Gha’ib Nazar was loyal and
that he fought for the khan against the rebels.

350

1681-1702

after the Juibari shaikhs themselves were sent to them. They simply refused to ‘take
the road of righteousness’ and Subhan Quli was forced to send an army against them.
The conflict began with a fierce battle outside the Shaikh Jalal gates of Bukhara.
According to Khwajah Samandar, only the khan's cannons enabled his side to win.
The rebels, however, were not crushed. They re-formed only a mile away, and when
the victor of Bala Murghab, Gha’ib Nazar Bi, arrived on the scene with the khan's

forces, another battle was fought during which both sides sustained heavy casualties.
Although the rebels eventually fled the battlefield, they soon regrouped and even
seized a nearby fort, the fort of Baba-yi Khishurtir,°2 from whence they harassed the
inhabitants of the capital for some time. Then they made for the fort of Dabusi,

entrenched themselves there and sent to Arang of Khwarazm for help.%
Subhan Quli was indignant. He wrote to the various governors of his towns for
reinforcements, but when the Balkh contingent, led by Mahmid Bi and by the

diwanbegi Khwajam Berdi, reached Bukhara on 6 Dhii ’I-hijja 1105/29 July 1694,
the khan consulted with the amirs and agreed to give the rebels a last chance. He felt
confident that his neighbour Arang, with whom he had recently exchanged
embassies, would refuse to help them. He also believed that they would gladly accept
the proffered olive branch in view of the recent increase in his forces. A third peacemission was accordingly sent off, this time to Dabusi. But on 20 Dha ’1-hijja/12
August, less than two weeks later, news came that Arang had agreed to help the
rebels and was even then approaching Qarakil. Subhan Quli ought to have
remembered that the rulers of Khwarazm were traditionally hostile towards the

khanate and that Arang himself had attacked the khanate in 1689!
On hearing the news, such was Subhan Quli's anger at his own naiveté and his
neighbour's treachery that he reacted with total disregard for the twin rules of
hospitality and diplomatic immunity: he gave orders for the Khwarazmian ambassador
to be taken prisoner. A group of soldiers set off to do so, armed with explosives, but
theirs turned out to be no easy task. The Khwarazmian and his suite fought back and
Mahmid Bi himself had to intervene in order to take the ambassador's house. Thirty
men were at last captured and when they were brought before the khan, he took an
even more drastic step: he had them all put to death. The very same day the
Khwarazmian caravansai was searched and every one of the 80 merchants found there
was placed under arrest. Like Imam Quli before him, Subhan Quli found it difficult to
assuage his thirst for revenge!
A few days later Arang arrived at Qarakil where, despite the governor's
resistance, he soon took the outer town. Before he could capture the citadel, however,

he was told that an army was on its way to Qarakil from Bukhara, so he left for
nearby Tarab where he arrived on 3 Muharram 1106/24 August 1694. The khan's
army followed under the command of Mahmid Bi and a major battle took place.
Mahmid Bi apparently showed himself to be ‘a lion of courage’ and, according to
Mirza Amin, he attacked so fiercely that Arang's army was ‘drowned in blood’ and

Arang left for Khwarazm that very night.
The following day, Mahmid Bi sacked the Khwarazmian camp and then marched
to Dabusi. The rebels prepared to fight, but after listening to Mahmud Bi's arguments
in favour of total submission to Subhan Quli, a few of them, such as Uz Timur

92 Khwajah Samandar calls it Baba-yi Khashart.

93 Muhammad Yusuf Munshi, 297b-9b, places the beginning of this rebellion after Arang's defeat.

94 Mirza Amin, 145a-7a. Khwajah Samandar, 144-8. Qipchaq Khan, 283a.
351

Subhan Quli

Qataghan, the mir akhar Khushhal Bi, Lafas Bi Qataghan and the Dorman tribe in
general, decided to give themselves up. The majority, however, remained obdurate
and fled, leaving their possessions and many of their tribal followers behind. Thus,
the diwanbegi Fadil Bi Yiz and the parwanchi Tughma Bi Yabu made for Ura Tipa
with 2,000 supporters, hoping that the governor, Rahim Bi, would go over to them.
But they were disappointed. The governor stood firm, either because he ‘would not
help one who was defeated’, or because his loyalty had been strengthened by a
carefully-worded letter from Subhan Quli, in the earlier part of the rebellion, in which
the khan expressed total trust in him.9> The rebels accordingly took up positions
nearer to Samarqand and began to raid the eastern outskirts of the town. The governor
of Samargand, Allah Birdi Bi,9® then marched against them, captured Tughma Bi and
other ringleaders, and lost no time in putting them to death.
When Mahmid Bi arrived in Bukhara with the repentant rebels on 15 Muharram
1106/5 September 1694, Subhan Quli showered him and his followers with favours,
blessed them all and dismissed them to Balkh. As for the former rebels, all who
accepted to ‘put the ring of obedience in their ear’ were pardoned and given rich

outfits ‘and favours’.97
Shortly after arriving in Balkh Mahmid Bi got together a large army and marched
into Badakhshan with the intention of assertittg his authority over Mir Yar Bik who
controlled the spinel mines and remitted a fixed quantity of this semi-precious stone
yearly to the Treasury. Two conflicting accounts of this campaign are available.
Muhammad Yusuf Munshi, who places it in 1103/1691-2, or even before Mahmud

Bi, had made his peace with the khan,?8 says his patron was totally successful. Mir
Yar Bik having withheld his annual tribute, Mahmud Bi marched towards Rustaq,
defeated him in battle, pursued him as he fled and killed most of his supporters. As a
result, within a fortnight Mir Yar Bik was forced to sue for peace and this was agreed
on condition that he would give Mahmud Bi two years' income from the mines in
advance.
A very different story is told by Qipchaq Khan, who describes the campaign as
highly unsuccessful. He insists that when Mahmid Bi marched on Badakhshan after
returning to Balkh, Subhan Quli was suspicious of his motives. The khan believed
that the amir wanted to impose his own control over Badakhshan and its rich mines.
He accordingly instructed the naqib Muhammad Sa‘id Khwajah to resist such an
attempt, which he did by deserting from Mahmid Bi's army at the crucial moment.
Mahmud Bi was therefore defeated. He fled, leaving the Badakhshanis to sack his
camp, but he later punished the khwajah by humiliating him publicly in Qunduz. The
amirs of Balkh then took the khwajah's side, withdrawing their support from
Mahmud Bi and appointing the ataliq Muhammad Jan to lead them against him.9?
Meanwhile Arang Muhammad

had died on 7 Rabi‘I 1106/26 October

1694,

shortly after returning to Khwarazm.!°° His sudden death, when he was not yet
95 Mukhtarov, Materialy, 29-30.

96 Khwajah Samandar, 151-2. Qipchaq Khan, 285a, gives him the incomplete name of Bahadur
Parwanchi Ming.

97 Mirza Amin, 147b-8b. Khwajah Samandar, 149-52. Muhammad Yasuf Munshi, 299b. Qipchaq
Khan,

283a, 285a, seems

to believe

that the rebels were

forgiven, but rebelled again in

1109/1697-8, on which occasion most of them were killed, but Fadil Bi was ‘again forgiven for
his crimes’.
98 Muhammad Yisuf Munshi, 303a-b.

99 Qipchaq Khan, 283a-b.
100 Mirza Amin, 148b-9, says the 7 Rabi‘I was a Saturday, but according to Wiistenfeld's tables it

go2

1681-1702

twenty years old, took his contemporaries by surprise and was variously explained.
Mirza Amin suggested that he pined away in despair at his recent defeat, Khwajah
Samandar wrote that he died of wounds sustained at Tarab. But Muhammad Yusuf
Munshi claimed that his entourage poisoned him by order of his amirs, for they had
realised that he was angry with them and intended to punish them (presumably for his
defeat).10! The theory that he was poisoned was also propounded by a Don Cossack,
Ivan Yakovlev, who was probably in Khiva at the time and who was certainly there
two years later, but he gave a rather far-fetched reason for it. It was simply a question
of divine retribution. Four years earlier ‘Aral Khan’ (sic) had impounded a statue of
St Nicholas from a Russian merchant and then sold the merchant and his companions
into slavery. ‘Aral Khan had also cursed the statue, broken it in three and defaced it
with a knife. (Not surprisingly therefore) the following year civil war had broken out

in Khwarazm and Arang's entourage had eventually poisoned him.1°
Whether or not Yakovlev was right, and whether this Arang was Anusha's son or
only an impostor, as alleged by Shir Muhammad, it is generally agreed that Arang
was followed on the throne by his three-year-old son. The Khwarazmian amirs then
hastened to release the Bukharan ambassador, the chihra aqasi Shir, whom Arang had
thrown into prison before the campaign and to write, assuring Subhan Quli of their

goodwill.!© This was welcome news for Subhan Quli, for it meant that he was at last
on good terms with all his neighbours, an ‘Uzbeck ambassador’ having been warmly
welcomed in the Iranian capital on 21 August 1694, or only two weeks after the
accession of the new

Shah, Sultan Husain.

Gemelli Carreri, who describes his

audience,!™ says that ambassadors from Mecca, Poland and Rome were received at
the same time and that the ‘Usbeck’, who was ‘fat after a barbarous manner’, was
particularly favoured by the Shah, as was the Papal envoy, for they were each given
three ceremonial outfits (calate) on the occasion of their first and last audiences,
whereas the Polish envoy only received one. And he explains that the Uzbeck wore
the ‘gown or cassack (sic) of cloth of gold flower'd’ with an ‘upper vest of cloth of
silver’ for the audience, while two members of his suite wore the other two gowns
which had been presented to him and which were different in colour.
During 1106/August 1694-August 1695 the situation in Balkh deteriorated and
became very serious. There was constant strife between Mahmud Bi and the local
amirs, for they refused to accept him as ruler. In 1107 both sides wrote to Subhan
Quli asking for the heir to the throne to be appointed to the area. Mahmud Bi
specifically asked for the khan's grandson, Muhammad Mugim, to be sent over,
saying that this was the only way to ensure ‘peace and quiet’, as well as happiness,
for the people and traders of the province. Subhan Quli did not relish the idea of

was a Monday.

101 Mirza Amin, 149a-150a. Khwajah Samandar, 148. Muhammad Yisuf Munshi, 300a.

102 p.A.I., X, 384.
103 Mirza Amin, 149a-150a. Khwajah Samandar, 148. Muhammad Yisuf Munshi, 300a. D.A./., X,

384. Qipchag Khan, 284a. Shir Muhammad, 456-7, says that, unbeknown to anyone, Arang had
died long before, as the result of a fall. His mother had replaced him with a nephew of hers, who
looked like her son. When in 1106 (1694-5) the false Arang's ataliq, Adina Muhammad, tried to
exterminate the local Uzbegs, they rebelled, killing (the false) Arang and his mother. Then they
replaced him with Jichi who was an Uzbeg and a descendant of Hajjim Khan.
104 Churchill, IV, book I, 144. This was probably an envoy from the khanate rather than from

Khwarazm, as Gemelli Carreri never mentioned Khwarazm at all, and only mentioned Uzbecks in

connection with Subhan Quli, ‘Abd al-‘Aziz and Muhammad Shaibani.

353

Subhan Quli

letting his beloved grandson become a pawn in the Balkh power-struggle, nor did he
want him to become a puppet-ruler under the aegis of Mahmid Bi. Confident that
Mahmid Bi would either back down, or else be cowed into submission if he chose to
rebel, he refused to send his grandson over, saying Muhammad Muqim was far too

young for the post.105
By then the khan had reached a peak of prestige and success, partly due to his
excellent relations with both his Qazaq and his Khwarazmian neighbours. Tauka, for
one, was widely known and respected, because he succeeded in rebuilding the towns
destroyed by Galdan (‘Bushukhtu Khan’) in 1681 and also in defeating him in 1685
and 1686. Although, according to Galdan's envoys to Irkutsk, the ten towns
destroyed in 1681 were still in ruins in 1691,! by 1696 Tauka was said to be ruling
over as many as 25 or 32 gorodki (towns or settlements?), including two Khitai

Qipchagq towns which he had captured in 1694.!°7 He was also confident enough to
send envoys to Tobol'sk, as well as raiders to Bashkiria and Siberia, thus causing
much concern to the Muscovite authorities. Yet, ever since 1693 he had been on good
terms with Subhan Quli and he made regular use of the trading facilities available in

Bukhara.108
In February 1695 the healthy state of Qazaq-Bukharan relations was made very
clear to two Muscovite ambassadors, Troshin and Skibin, whom Tauka had detained
in Turkestan. In their report to the Tsars Ivan and Peter they pointed out that when an
envoy from Bukhara requested the release of Bukharan captives whom Tauka had
taken from the Qitai Qipchag in 1694, the men were at once rounded up and given to
him. However, a similar request for the Muscovites captured near Tobol'sk in 1691

and 1693 was refused point blank. The disappointed Muscovite envoys failed to
realise that the circumstances of the two cases were quite different and they concluded

that the decision showed both hostility and discrimination. !°9 As further proof of
their theory they noted that their Bukharan counterparts were given plenty of food and
were ‘treated with honour’, whereas their party received neither and were also forced
to hear ‘improper words’ about the Tsar, as well as curses against the Christian
religion. A few months later, taking advantage of the fact that the Sungar Galdan was
having problems with the Chinese and with his nephew, Tsevan Arabtan, Tauka
made a show of strength in the area of Tashkent, possibly at Subhan Quli's
suggestion. He camped outside the town with 15,000 men for a month in the summer
of 1695, but made no attempt to fight, perhaps because his intention had only been to
warn the Qalmag that neither he nor Subhan Quli would let them retain control over
Tashkent much longer. Fedor Skibin, who was still held in Turkestan, was certainly

puzzled by Tauka's forbearance. He noted in astonishment that during the campaign
“‘Tevkikhan got no prisoners, killed no one and took nothing’ .!10
Whether or not Tauka considered himself to be Subhan Quli's vassal, the
Bukharan ruler could undoubtedly exert some influence over him, as when the Tatar
guide and merchant from Muscovy, Taushko Chichkanov, was robbed by Tauka's
Tatar subjects. Chichkanov having lodged a complaint with Subhan Quli in late 1695-

105 Hai Mir, 315a-b. Mirza Amin, 150b. Muhammad Yisuf Munshi, 303b-4a. Qipchaq Khan,
a.

106 Rumyantsev, 408-9. Howorth, I, 641. Russko-mongol'skie otnosheniya, I, 302.

107 D.A.L, X, 389, 381. Materialy, 263. See note 31 above about the word gorodok (pl. gorodki).

108 p.A.1., X, 388, 381-2.
109 Thid., 386, 381-2.
110 Thid., 382.

354

1681-1702

early 1696, the khan at once acted energetically and effectively on his behalf. Getting
the goods back from the robbers, he returned them to Taushko. He then entrusted
Chichkanov with letters for the Tsars Ivan and Peter and for the voevoda of Tobol'sk,
in which he no doubt apologised for what had happened and stressed that, although
no ambassadors had been exchanged for many years, he was still interested in
retaining and developing his links with Muscovy and Siberia.!!!
In October 1695 Subhan Quli's prestige received a major boost when Khwarazm
chose a new khan who promptly became his vassal. This ‘vassal of Samalgun, king
of Bukhara’, whom Skibin and his party called Kalmamet (Qul Muhammad?) was
apparently an Uzbeg from the Aral region, as was his predecessor, a certain Kabakly
Khan. Skibin was told that Kabakly Khan had seized power by force. With an army
of 5,000 fellow-Uzbegs from the Aral he had fought his way into Khiva and had then
given orders for Arang's sons to be suffocated. But despite his ruthless determination
to stay in power, his reign had lasted only a few months. Shortly after his takeover a
certain Qaraqalpaq Prince called “Toburchuk Sultan’ had set up camp near Khiva with
100 followers. Kabakly Khan lured him into the town by offering to share Khwarazm

with him, and had him put to death two days later with many of his followers. This
act of unnecessary cruelty and duplicity probably angered his officials for they took
up arms against him. A major battle was fought, and after he was overcome and killed
they chose Kalmamet to replace him. Qul Muhammad ‘became Subhan Quli's subject’
shortly after his accession, either of his own

free will, or on the advice of his

officials, and the Bukharan ruler was only too happy to accept him as a vassal, for
reasons of prestige as well as for the purpose of developing his own relations with

Muscovy.!12
But to return to the situation in Balkh. Subhan Quli's refusal to send Muhammad
Mugim to Balkh in 1107/August 1695-July 1696 greatly upset Mahmid Bi. Clearly
this was only an excuse, for at 17 the Prince was certainly old enough to be appointed
governor. The amir was particularly hurt by the implication that the khan mistrusted
him. He decided to march on Bukhara and force Subhan Quli to change his mind. The
amirs of the Qurama tribe,!!3 who were equally convinced that the heir to the throne
should assume the govrnment of Balkh, set off with him for Bukhara, but on the way
he had second thoughts. Either because he feared arrest, or because he did not entirely
trust his new allies, he returned to Balkh where he seized the citadel from the Uzbeg
amirs with the help of Qipchaq and Turkmen supporters. Then he appointed a
governor for the province on 24 Shawwal 1107/27 May 1696. The man he chose for
this task, Salih Khwajah, was descended from the much revered and famous
Nagqshbandi khwajah known as Khwajah Parsa. He was also a nephew of Subhan
Quli's, a fact which ought to have pleased the khan,!!4 but Subhan took this as an
attempt at secession and was indignant about Mahmid Bi's conduct.
His anger did not abate, even after Mahmud Bi sent word that Salih Khwajah
would be removed from power and packed off to India if Muhammad Mugim were

111 Russko-mongol'skie

otnosheniya, 1, 302. D.A.1., X, 384.

112 Tpid.
113 Muhammad Yisuf Munshi, 304a, 305a. This tribe is also mentioned in Mahmid b. Wali (Ethé),
119a, but it has not been found in the exhaustive list of ‘Uzbeg’ tribes reproduced in Sultanov,
Kochevye plemena, 29-33. Semenov suggests that the name Qurama was a loose term applied
to a group of tribes.

114 Mirza Amin, 150a-1b. Hajji Mir (314b-6a), Qipchag Khan (284a-b), and Muhammad Yisuf
Munshi (303b-304b) all say Salih Khwajah was Subhan Quli's sister's son.

355

Subhan Quli

sent to Balkh. The khan began to prepare for a fourth expedition to the province with

the encouragement and support of the Qirama amirs,!!5 who had discarded their
original plan and lodged a formal complaint against Mahmud Bi after arriving in
Bukhara. According to Muhammad Yisuf Munshi the Qarama amirs pursued their
complaint against Mahmid Bi by writing to the people of the area of Qunduz and
inciting them to rise against him. As expected, Mahmid Bi went there at once to deal
with the rebellion, leaving Balkh in the charge of Salih Khwajah, with a newly-

appointed ataliq and diwanbegi to guide him in his task.!!® As soon as this was
known in Bukhara Subhan Quli set off for Balkh. He left the capital on 10 Safar
1108/8 September 1696, in order to take advantage of the amir's absence and to
regain control over the town and province.!!7 But, when Salih Khwajah heard that
Subhan Quli was on his way with an army said to number 200,000,!!8 he wrote
entreating Mahmid Bi to return, whereupon the amir hurried back, strengthened the
town's fortifications and prepared for a siege.
Subhan Quli must have been informed about his return, for he did not hurry to get
to Balkh. He took nearly two months on his way, and when he arrived outside Balkh
on 5 Rabi‘II 1108/1 November 1696 the fighting began at once. No mercy was
shown by the khan. All the prisoners taken by his army were put to death. It is
generally agreed that the siege lasted three to four weeks, but, not surprisingly, the
two main sources disagree as to when negotiations were started, and by whom.
Muhammad Yusuf Munshi, who wrote what was in effect a panegyric of Mahmud
Bi, says that they were initiated by the khan and that he sued for peace on the twentyfirst day, following an incursion by ‘Baluchi and Arabs’ into his camp at night which
left him without horses or camels. Subhan Quli's Court historian, Mirza Amin,
maintains that Mahmid Bi opened the negotiations, and less than a week after the
khan's arrival. According to this version the amir asked to be forgiven and promised
to submit if the khan left for Bukhara and appointed ‘one of the royal Princes’ as his

heir and ruler of Balkh.!!9 The khan responded positively, promising to treat
Mahmid Bi kindly and to appoint him to Qunduz, but the fighting continued and it
was only after four fierce battles, in which both sides suffered many casualties, that
effective negotiations took place. This time they were conducted, not by Mahmid Bi
himself, as on the previous two occasions, but by a descendant of Khwajah Ahrar

named Khwajah Zaccharias,!2° who was bound to carry much weight with the pious
khan because of his high standing and impeccable religious background. On 25
Rabi‘II/21 November the khwajah brought a plea for forgiveness from Mahmid Bi
which was very well received, perhaps because the khan was keen to leave the
115 Muhammad Yisuf Munshi, 304b.
116 Muhammad Yisuf Munshi, 305a. Yar Muhammad Bi Ming, a former supporter of Abi ’1
Mansur who had escaped Sadiq Muhammad's reprisals (280a), became his atéliq and Nadir Bi
Turkman became his diwanbegi. The Badakhshan rebellion is not mentioned elsewhere, although
Hajji Mir, 316b, agrees that Mahmud Bi was in Qunduz, his hometown, when he heard that
Subhan Quli's army was approaching Balkh.

117 Mirza Amin, 151b. Muhammad Yusuf Munshi, 304b-5a, places the army's departure far later,
i.e., six months after Mahmid Bi left for Badakhshan.

118 Thid., 305a. Qipchaq Khan, 284b. Hajji Mir, 316a, gives the smaller number of 20,000 mounted
warriors.

119 Muhammad Yisuf Munshi, 305b. Mirza Amin, 153b-8a.
120 Thid., 158a-9b. It is not clear whether this was the religious leader whose daughter was briefly
married to Anusha after the Khwarazmian ruler seized Samarqand. According to Salahetdinova
(Khwajah Samandar Termez, 108) the ae in question had fled to India after Anusha's defeat
and had died en route.

356

1681-1702

province before the winter set in. The khwajah was sent back with gifts and he
returned the same day to finalise a peace agreement. As a sign of goodwill Subhan
Quli then freed and sent back one of Mahmid Bi's servants whom his army had
captured. Two days later the amir responded with a (grateful) letter and several
kharwar (ass's loads) of sweet pomegranates and pears. This was reciprocated in
kind and the khan left the town the following day.
Subhan Quli could claim a victory, for he had received Mahmid Bi's submission
and a formal promise that Salih Khwajah would be removed to India. But in fact he
had been forced to agree to the amir's request for a royal governor, and a few months
went by before either party carried out the terms of their agreement. In the meantime
the khan and his army marched to Bukhara ‘at great speed’. Twelve days after leaving
Balkh he was back in the capital, having waited nearly a week on the banks of the
Amu-Darya until the whole of his army had crossed. The reason for his haste seems
to have been that some of the local tribes had not fully accepted the agreement. They
may even have started to harass his army, for Mirza Amin writes that a number of
Qunghrat and Qipchag crossed the river straight after him and that on 6 Jumada I (6
days later) he set off towards Bukhara ‘at great speed’. Muhammad Yusuf Munshi
says Mahmud Bi promised to prevent such harassment and kept his promise by
remaining three whole days in Balkh after Subhan Quli's departure ‘until the khan had
safely crossed the Amu-Darya with his army’. But he is a notoriously unreliable
source and it suited him to portray the amir, who was his patron, in the best possible
light. Mirza Amin, on the other hand, had no particular love either for Mahmid Bi or
for the people of Balkh. He wished it to be known that they had taken unfair
advantage of the retreat but was only able to hint at this, for he could not risk
displeasing Subhan Quli by admitting that his withdrawal was more akin to a

flight.121
Subhan Quli was particularly anxious to leave the area and to return to Bukhara,
because he feared that the campaign might have damaged his prestige, and that
Mahmid Bi's success might trigger off another spate of rebellions, but this did not
happen. In fact the campaign had no adverse repercussions as far as the khan was

concerned. On the other hand, Mahmid Bi was faced with new problems shortly after
the khan's departure. While he was in Badakhshan the diwanbegi whom he had
earlier appointed to Balkh turned against him, possibly because he was displeased
with the agreement reached. This official, known as Nadir Bi Turkman, encouraged
his followers to attack Mahmid Bi's supporters and to seize their possessions. The
rebellion went on for a whole month until Mahmid Bi returned to Balkh and ordered
the diwanbegi to be put to death. Nadir Bi tried to save himself by flight, but he was
caught and put to death, as were his close relatives.
!22
This was not the last of Mahmid Bi's problems. The situation in Balkh
deteriorated further, Salih Khwajah lost support and, according to Muhammad Yusuf
Munshi, law and order broke down altogether. When this happened Mahmud Bi
wrote again to ask for Muhammad Muqim to come over and Subhan Quli at last
agreed to part with his beloved grandson, on condition that Salih Khwajah was sent
away before his arrival, and that Mahmid Bi retired to Badakhshan.
Mahmid Bi agreed to these conditions and faithfully adhered to them. Salih

121 Muhammad Yasuf Munshi, 305a-b. Mirza Amin, 154a-161a. Hajji Mir, 316b-7a. Qipchaq
Khan, 284b.
122 Muhammad Yasuf-Munshi, 306a, says that this was the official who was responsible for having

Aba ’I-Mansir assassinated in 1683. Hajji Mir, 317a-b.

357

Subhan Quli

Khwajah was sent off to India, and he himself retired to Badkahshan. On 3 Rabi‘II
1109/19 October 1697, or nearly a year after he had returned fom Balkh, Subhan Quli
formally appointed Muhammad Mugqim governor of Balkh and also heir to the throne.
Six days later the Prince was sent to take up his post. He was accompanied by two
amirs from Balkh who were to act respectively as his ataliq and his diwanbegi, and

who would help him govern the province, while defending him from Mahmid Bi.!23
A few days before appointing his grandson to govern Balkh, Subhan Quli had an
equally important and more straightforward task to perform: he was asked to choose a
successor for his former protégé, Qul Muhammad, ruler of Khwarazm. He nominated
a certain Shah Niyaz Muhammad whom he sent off, according to Mirza Amin, on 28
Rabi‘ I 1109/14 October 1697 with his blessing and with instructions to guard the
law, abstain from tyranny, rule with justice, respect the theologians and give peace to

the people.!”4 The réle played by Subhan Quli in appointing Shah Niyaz is mentioned
in a letter which the Khwarazmian ruler wrote to Peter the Great in 1698. However, it

is not clear whether the new ruler was of Khwarazmian or Bukharan origin.
Bukharan sources claim that he was from the Qataghan tribe of the khanate who

camped near Badakhshan.!25 The early 19th-century Khwarazmian historian alMu’nis says that Shah Niyaz was the son of Juchi (Jujiq?) and as such a descendant
of the famous Hajjim Khan, but this is difficult'to accept because Juchi cannot have
been more than seven years old in 1697.126 As for Shah Niyaz, in his letters to the
Tsar, he refers to Subhan Quli as his ‘uncle’ and attributes his accession to ‘the wish

of my ruler and the friendship of the ruler of Bukhara’. This would seem to suggest
that he was chosen by Qul Muhammad to replace him and that he was a Khwarazmian
who was also related to Subhan Quli. If that was so, then he could have been the
issue of one of three marriages, namely the one between Abu ’|-Ghazi's niece and
Subhan Quli, or the marriage between Anusha and one of ‘Abd al-‘Aziz's two
daughters. In any case it seems that he had been an ishik aga bashi, or an official in

charge of security at Subhan Quli's palace.!27
Shah Niyaz's nomination and Muhammad Muqim's subsequent despatch to Balkh
must have improved Subhan Quli's standing among his contemporaries,!28 but two
and a half years after his appointment to Khwarazm, Shah Niyaz decided to become
Peter the Great's vassal.129 The reasons for his change of heart are not well
documented. However, it seems likely that it resulted from a serious weakening in
Subhan Quli's power after several more rebellions broke out in the khanate. Although
123 Mirza Amin, 169a-170a. Muhammad Yusuf Munshi, 307a-b.
124 Mirza Amin, 171a-b. TsSGADA, fond 134, op.1, 1699-1700, list 17. Earlier dates are advanced
by Hajji Mir (304b) and Muhammad Yisuf Munshi (300a) who place Shah Niyaz's accession
straight after the death of Arang, i.e. in October 1694, and also by Qipchaq Khan (284a) who
places it after the death of Arang's son Jujiq (Juchi?) in 1106 (August 1694-August 1695). But
these dates cannot be correct, for Shah Niyaz is not mentioned in Troshin and Skibin's detailed
account of recent Khwarazmian changes of rulers and they were in Khiva until Easter 1696.
125 Qipchaq Khan, 284a. Muhammad Yisuf Munshi, 300a. Hajji Mir, 304b, only says he was a
devoted servant of Subhan Quli, without mentioning his tribal affiliation.

126 Shir Muhammad, 457. Qipchag Khan, 283a, says Jachi was 3 in 1694.
127 TsGADA, fond 134, op.1, 1699-1700 no.1, listy 17-18, 77. P.S.Z, IV, 61-62. Muhammad
Yusuf Munshi, 300a. Qipchagq Khan, 284a. Hajji Mir, 304b, says he was a devoted servant of

Subhan Quli's. Materialy, 267, 268n., 272-3. Here he is called Ishak Aga (probably a
misspelling of the name ishik aqa).
128 ney enough the official chosen as Muhammad Mugim's diwanbegi was also called Shah
iyaz.

129 TsGADA, fond 134, op.1, 1699-1700 no.1, listy 17-18, 77. P.S.Z, IV, 62.

358

1681-1702

Shah Niyaz continued to intercede in Muscovy on behalf of the merchants of

Bukhara, as well as those of Khwarazm, he must have felt that he could no longer
count on Subhan Quli to protect him against his hostile Turkmen subjects.
The rebellions in question took place in 1109-10/1697-8 and affected both
Samarqand and Balkh. According to Qipchag Khan the diwanbegi Fadil Bi and a

certain Tughma temporarily seized Samarqand in 1109/1697-8,139 and according to

Muhammad Yusuf Munshi there was also trouble in Balkh. Only a year after
Muhammad Mugim had made his triumphant entrance into Balkh, (i.e. in the autumn
of 1698), Mahmud Bi demanded that he be included among his circle of advisers. He
complained that although he had only ever striven for the good of Muhammad
Mugim, the khan had by-passed him altogether, appointing others to serve the Prince
as ataliq and diwanbegi. Muhammad Muqim replied guardedly that he had passed on
the message to his grandfather and that Mahmid Bi was free to go to Bukhara (at any
time), if permitted to do so by Subhan Quli. Mahmid Bi did not take the rebuff
kindly. He gathered an army and marched on Balkh, but his enemies of the Qurama
tribe took up arms and he was forced to go back to Badakhshan.
Muhammad Mugqim had been saved, but shortly afterwards his position was
threatened again. Muhammad Yusuf Munshi explains that when the Prince's
diwanbegi died (probably in 1699), the representatives of the Durman and Qipchaq
tribes tried to remove from power his colleague and ally, the ataliq ‘Adil Bi Ming.
131
They wrote to him complaining about his excessive power and tyrannical methods,
and told him that he must leave for Bukhara, or expect the worst. But ‘Adil Bi
managed to put the ringleaders to death. He also strengthened his position by having
the Prince's eunuch put to death, and Muhammad Mugqim, who was seriously ill for a
month, was unable to intervene. By the time he recovered, the Qipchagq tribe had
rebelled in the western part of the province, so he was unable to discipline ‘Adil Bi.
However, he sent the whole of the Ming tribe, i.e., the ataliq's fellow-tribesmen, to
deal with the rebellion, and in the battle which ensued 500 of them, including many of
‘Adil Bi's relatives were killed, and their horses, camels and tents fell into the hands
of the Qipchaq.
Having thus successfully weakened the power of ‘Adil Bi, the Prince continued
the fight against the Qipchaq. Although he did not dispense with the services of ‘Adil
Bi altogether, he showed his displeasure by putting another in charge of the
campaign. The man chosen for this purpose was Salih Khwajah's former ataliq, Yar
Muhammad Bi Ming, who was the governor of Maimana. Yar Muhammad Bi Ming
dealt with the Qipchaq quickly and efficiently, capturing some of the ringleaders and
having them put to death, while persuading the Prince to forgive some of the others.
But he was unable to complete his task, for he was told of an Iranian attack on
Maimana and Jijektu, and had to go back to defend the frontier area. Although he
belonged to the same tribe as ‘Adil Bi, Yar Muhammad was no friend of the Prince's
ataliq. He told Muhammad Mugim of ‘Adil Bi's improper conduct and of the many
complaints against him which emanated from the army. After Yar Muhammad's
130 Qipchaq Khan, 284b-Sa. If by Tighma the historian meant the parwanchi Tughma Bi, this
particular official cannot have been involved, for, according to Khwajah Samandar (152) he had
been put to death some years earlier, after the rebellion of 1105.
131 His tribal affiliation is not stated in Muhammad Yusuf Munshi's detailed account. However, it is

implied by the fact that the ataliq's brother and 12 of his relatives were killed in battle when the
whole of the Ming tribe was sent against the Qipchaq. Muhammad

Yusuf Munshi, 310a-b.

Qipchaq Khan, 284b, on the other hand, not only calls him ‘Adil Bi Ming, but says he was the

son of Kipak ataliq Ming.

359

Subhan Quli

departure ‘Adil Bi, who realised that he had lost the Prince's goodwill, fled to
Shiburghan. Muhammad Mugqim then appointed another ataliq and diwanbegi to help
him govern the province. Hoewever, if we are to believe Muhammad Yusuf Munshi,
neither the Qipchag tribe, nor the leaders of the Prince's army would recognise these
officials. They wrote to the Prince and to Mahmid Bi asking for him to become the
Prince's atalig, and Mahmid Bi came over to Balkh. Muhammad Muqim managed to
hold out until ‘Adil Bi began to pillage the outskirts of Balkh in the summer of 1702,

when he had no option but to invite Mahmud Bi into the town. !32
While his grandson was struggling to rule Balkh, Subhan Quli was continuing to
send embassies to his neighbours. Some time in 1699, possibly after the Iranian
attack on Maimana and Jijektu, relations with Iran appear to have been re-established,
for the Papal Nuncio mentioned that he saw ‘alcuni ambasciatori Tartari’ at the Shah's
Court on 21 November and that they were dismissed just before he had dinner with
the Shah.133 A Bukharan envoy, Qutb al-Din, was also sent to India. He arrived at

Aurangzib's Court in the Deccan on 20 Dhu ’I-qa‘da 1109/30 May 1698 and was
generously treated there. It is not known what message he took to the Emperor, but
he was probably expected to assure him that Subhan Quli was still firmly in control of
the khanate, despite the Salih Khwajah episode and Subhan Quli's regrettable
confrontation with Mahmid Bi in late 1696. Subhan Quli was well aware that the
province was watched with particular interest by the Emperor, and that Aurangzib had
appointed his eldest son, Shah A‘lam, governor of Sind and Punjab in 1695. He also
knew that Salih Khwajah had sought refuge in India, and he probably hoped that after
Qutb al-Din's embassy Aurangzib would decline to help the khwajah, should he
attempt to regain the throne of Balkh.!34 However, it seems that Salih Khwajah did
not try to take Balkh by force. And as for Qutb al-Din, he was kept so long at Court
that he had ample time to fall under the spell of life in India. When he was at last
dismissed in 1701, he only went as far as Kabul, stopped there and asked to be taken
into the Emperor's service.!35 A year earlier Aurangzib had transferred Shah A‘lam
from Sind to Kabul in the hope that he would recover the khanate, thus fulfilling Shah
Jahan's wish. But, luckily for Subhan Quli this threat never materialised for, much to

his father's disappointment, Shah A‘lam failed even to regain Qandahar from Iran. 136
Little else is known about the last years of Subhan Quli's reign except that he
appears to have retained control over Khwarazm and to have sent an embassy to

Siberia in 1702.!57When Shah Niyaz died in 1112/1700-1, Subhan Quli was asked
once again to choose a ruler for the neighbouring khanate and, according to Qipchaq
Khan, he chose for this task a descendant of Jani Beg Sultan called Misi Sultan who

lived in Miyankal.!38 Misi Sultan appears to have ruled Khwarazm at least until the
death of Subhan Quli, but his reign, which is not mentioned by al-Mu’nis, came to an
end shortly afterwards. In March 1703 his successor, a certain Aran Mamet (‘Arab
Muhammad), wrote to Peter the Great asking for ‘loving’ relations and expressing a

132 Muhammad Yisuf Munshi, 309a-31 1b.
133 Dy Mans, 386.
134 CHI, IV, 296. Bilimoria, 1. Since 1676 Shah A‘lam (Muhammad Mu‘azzam) was Aurangzib's
eldest surviving son.

135
136
137
138

gaqi, 397, 440.
‘Inayat Allah, 37a-b. Billimoria, 3-4.
Cahen, XXV.
Qipchaq Khan, ; 285a. , It is not clear whether Jani Be g
Ashtarkhanid of that name.

360

a was the Shaibibani
Sultan
pas

1681-1702

desire to become the Tsar's vassal. He also put in a plea on behalf of Central Asian
merchants, Bukharan as well as Khwarazmian, asking that dues on their transactions

and their goods be taken in kind rather than in money, which seems a clear enough

indication that he was on good terms with the ruler of the khanate.139

Subhan Quli continued to study well into his old age, writing poetry, and
increasing his library with a wide range of books. He collected books on Sufism,
Islamic law, ethics, astrology and Arabic, and was particularly interested in pharmacy
and medicine. He wrote his own compendium of cures for various illnesses (Hiyd’
al-Tabb Subhani) in which classical remedies, and the treatments which he himself

had used on patients, alternated with herbal and magic cures. He also built and
endowed several medressehs and took a great interest in the hospital which he
founded in Bukhara, where special diets were automatically provided for the

140
patients.
Subhan Quli's last illness began on | Rabi‘II 1114/25 August 1702 when he was
74 or 75 years of age.!41 He died later that month, to be succeeded by his son
‘Ubaidallah, much to the dismay of Muhammad Muqim who had expected to be the
next khagan. And indeed his grandfather seemed to have intended him for this post,
for he had not only shown him much affection, he had also named him his heir in

October 1697 and had sent him to Balkh, where the heir of the throne traditionally
learnt the basic rules of government.
However, the situation had changed so radically during the next few years that
Subhan Quli appears to have discarded his original succession plan by August 1702.
And if Teufel is right in suggesting that ‘Ubaidallah was in fact younger than his
nephew Muhammad Mugim, then there must have been important reasons for the

change of plan.!42 The evidence, however, is unclear. Hajji Mir merely says that
Subhan Quli chose ‘Ubaidallah on realising, after nine days of illness, that he could
not be cured of the ‘various ailments which had come together’. Qipchaq Khan, on
the other hand, suggests that Muhammad Mugqim's behaviour may have displeased
his grandfather, the young man having apparently taken to drink and surrounded
himself with low, vulgar men (arazil) and with members of the (powerful) Qipchaq

tribe, i.e. non-Uzbegs, who might try to interfere again, as in the days of Imam Quli,
with the administration of Balkh. Whether or not this caused Subhan Quli to change
his mind, an important factor in his ultimate choice must have been the fear that an
insurrection might break out if his successor were not proclaimed as soon as possible
after his death. This argument is advanced, surprisingly enough, not only by
Muhammad Mugim's biographer, Muhammad Yusuf Munshi, but also by
‘Ubaidallah's biographer, Mir Muhammad Amin, although they present it with a
rather different emphasis.

According to Mir Muhammad Amin, the Bukharan amirs and high officials who
gathered at Court after Subhan Quli's passing were advised that “Ubaidallah's brother

139 Materialy, 273-4, 448-9, 269-70. TsSGADA, fond 134, op.1, 1699-1700 n.1, listy 78-80. Shir
Muhammad, 458. Rather surprisingly Al-Mu’nis fails to mention ‘Arab Muhammad among
Shah Niy4z's successors. He gives no date for Shah Niyaz's death and says he was followed on
the throne by his son Shah Baght who reigned for a year, and then by Sayyid “Ali Khan, whose
short reign began either in 1115/1703-4 or in 1116/1704-5.

140 Vambéry, Travels, 336-7. Hofman, I, vol. 4, 267. Muhammad Yisuf Munshi, 317a.
141 Although Hajji Mir, 267a, 321 b, says he was born in 1038, in the Year of the Dragon (1027-8)

he still insists that the khan was 77 when he died.
142 Teufel, 258n, says ‘Ubaidallah was 30 on 26 February 1711, which means that he was born in
1681, whereas, as mentioned earlier, Muhammad Muqim was apparently born in 1090/1679-80.

361

Subhan Quli

Asadallah was just as worthy to be chosen. Many of them thought it more urgent to
deal with certain elements who were as ‘a splinter in the root’ of the throne and whose
nefarious influence, like that of ‘devilish...suckers’, had spread from the Court,

which they controlled, to the army and the people. However, the danger of an
uprising was such that they decided to settle the matter of succession first and to place
‘Ubaidallah on the throne, since his father had ‘earlier’ chosen him.
Muhammad Yasuf Munshi's version of events is as follows: on realising that his
illness had no cure, Subhan Quli summoned his amirs and close advisers and told
them that he had seen ‘on the forehead of Muhammad Mugim the rays of kingship’
(ie. a divine mark to that effect). He added that among his ‘children’ (sic) this Prince
(alone) was ‘noble on both sides’ (both his parents belonging to the Ashtarkhanid
dynasty), a clear enough indication of his wishes. His decision seems to have been
accepted at the time but , when he died, the despair of the population was such that
‘for the sake of the good order of the realm’ the amirs and close advisers decided to

proclaim ‘Ubaidallah ‘although he was younger in years’ .143
So much for the versions advanced by the historians of the khanate. Two other
considerations may well have been behind the choice of ‘Ubaidallah. The first was
Muhammad Mugim's failure to remain independent. The fact that Mahmud Bi was in
effective control of Balkh meant that if Muhammad Muqim succeeded his grandfather
in Bukhara he might well be accompanied by the all-powerful ataliq, and neither
Subhan Quli, nor the amirs and officials of Bukhara, could allow this to happen. That
could have caused Subhan Quli to disinherit his grandson in favour of one who was
younger and who, since he had lived ‘concealed in the harem’, had no experience of
government. The other reason is unlikely to have carried any weight with Subhan
Quli, although it would have been very important to his courtiers. The fact that
‘Ubaidallah was totally inexperienced in the art of government meant that his courtiers
could expect to have a free hand under him and to make him do as they wished. And
this is in fact what happened, as the sad story of his reign reveals. When Muhammad
Mugim, after reluctantly accepting the fait accompli, changed his mind and disputed

‘Ubaidallah's right to rule on grounds of seniority, ‘Ubaidallah at once decided to
march to Balkh and force him into submission. However, his amirs and courtiers
managed to put him off for years by suggesting that other expeditions against unruly
governors or tribal leaders were far more urgent. He thus became a byword for
indecision and ineffectiveness and although he finally marched to Balkh in 1707, he
was too late to discipline his nephew. Muhammad Mugqim had been killed and
Mahmud Bi, who had arranged the murder, had taken over the town.
‘Ubaidallah decided to punish the murderer and besieged Balkh. The town was
stormed, Mahmud Bi was put to flight, but within two to three years he was pardoned
and reinstated. He then ruled Balkh independently and continued to do so until well

after the unfortunate ‘Ubaidallah himself was murdered in March 1711.!44
With Subhan Quli's passing the heyday of the khanate came to an end. Ma wara’
al-nahr began to split up into several independent or semi-independent parts and the
later Ashtarkhanid rulers lost their prestige, as well as their power.

143 Mir Muhammad Amin, 17-21. Muhammad Yusuf Munshi, 313a-4a, 315a. The text should
probably be read as ba wujud sa‘r san and not ba wuja‘ sa‘r san. Hajji Mir, 318b, simply says
that when his condition worsened, Subhan Quli summoned his amirs, read them his will, and

then “Ubaidallah was proclaimed ‘according to the law of Genghis Khan’.
144 Mir Muhammad Amin, 83, 85, 87-94, 99-100, 137, 205-6, 271.

362

Part Two

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10
Merchandise

Trade was a vital part of Bukharan life in which all classes of the population were
involved. It was highly valued by the khans as a source of income, both through the
taxes paid by local and foreign merchants, and also as a result of their own trading
activities. Unfortunately the information available is rather piecemeal. The most
complete evidence about the quantities and varieties of goods carried by Bukharans is
found in Muscovite contemporary documents - Customs records, inventories and
official letters. No such records appear to have been kept in the khanate. However,
valuable information about goods, as well as trade procedures can be gleaned from
the legal documents relating to sales, purchases, wills and grants of tax-exemptions
which were drawn up in front of the local qadi.
The general scale of Bukharan trading operations is not known, nor is it possible
to speculate as to the proportion of the national income involved, but it is known that
commerce was wide-ranging and that European goods, as well as goods from India,
Iran, Turkey, Egypt, Aleppo and China could be found at various times in the
khanate.! In addition to these items, Bukharan merchants carried articles purchased in
nomad encampments as well as a variety of items produced in the khanate, the bulk of
their stock-in-trade consisting of cotton goods of every type.
The range of goods carried by Bukharans is discussed below.

Materials

1. Cottons

Raw cotton and blue yarn were carried, as well as six types of materials made of pure
cotton, and three others which consisted of a mixture of cotton and other fibres.
a. Raw cotton, the khlopchataya bumaga of Muscovite records, was sold there by
the pound, this being the Russian lb of 409.5 grammes, or by the pud, a unit of
weight equal to 16.38 kg or 40 Russian lb.2 It was used for quilting clothes and
coverlets. It generally cost between 19 and SO den'gi per Ib in Siberia (3.8 to 10
roubles per pud), although a price of 16 roubles per pud is recorded for Yeniseisk in
1 TsGADA, fond 109, op.1, 1669-75 kn.1, listy 53b, 111b. Muhammad
278b. Mukminova, Sotsial’naya diferentsiatsiya, 113.
2 All weights will be given in Russian Ib unless otherwise stated.

Yasuf Munshi, 259b,

Bukharan trade

1649. It was far cheaper in Muscovy where it could obtained at prices ranging
between 6 and 15 den'gi per lb in the early seventeenth century, and individual
Bukharans are known to have taken quantities of 16, 32, 98 and 147 kg up the
Volga.3 Blue yarn (bumaga sinyaya shit'yo) cost 2 to 4 times as much,‘ and,
perhaps because a merchant was sure to get 80 den'gi per Ib for it in Siberia, he was
ready to take there as little as 2 to 4 Ib, although the usual amount carried to Muscovy
was 20-60 lb, and one merchant delivered as many as 120 lb (49 kg) to Kazan’ in
1616.5
b. Zandanichi, the Russian zenden', took its name from the village of Zandana near

Bukhara. It was already made there in the eighth, and perhaps as early as the sixth
century, when it appears to have been a type of silk, the name zendanechi having
been deciphered on a piece of Sogdian material of that period. The silk variety was far
thinner than the cotton varieties known in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Cotton zenden' was woven in several single colours - green, red, yellow and blue and made in different thicknesses. The thickest variety, se bandi/triple zenden’, was
most popular in Siberia, where it was used for making clothes or lining Church

vestments.°®
Two varieties of zenden' made in China were also taken to Tobol'sk by
Bukharans in the first part of the seventeenth century. One was black, and the other,
called zenden' purben, was woven like zenden', but made of silk. Finally Bukharans
carried zandanichi ready-made into shirts, caftans and a particular type of male outer
garment called azyam', which was knee-length and gathered at the back.
Large quantities of zenden’ were sold in Muscovy and Siberia, where it was very
popular because it was both strong and cheap. Its market price in Tara and Tobol'sk
ranged from 34 den'gi to 140 den'gi (1/6-3/4 rouble) per length or konets during the
seventeenth century. In the eastern Siberian town of Yeniseisk its value went down
from 180 den'gi for just over 7 metres in 1645, to 60 den'gi in 1687.’ Quantities

3 For the cost of raw cotton see Materialy, 379; TsGADA,
Vilkov, Remeslo, table 29; TsGADA.

fond 214, op.1, kn. 588, list 38b;

fond 214, op.1, kn. 254, list 8b. See the following for

quantities carried: Ziyaev, Ekonomicheskie svyazi, 36, 34, 35; Pamyatniki, XXII, 643.
4 Materialy, 379. Here the highest price quoted for raw cotton is 40 den'gi per Ib. and the blue

variety cost twice as much. According to Vilkov (Remeslo, table 29) the market price of a pud of
raw cotton in Tobol'sk in 1639-40 was 400-600 kopecks (4-6 roubles), i.e., 20-30 den'gi per Ib,

and blue yarn cost 1,600 kopecks (16 roubles), i.e. 80 den'gi. N.B. Ziyaev, Ekonomicheskie
svyazi, Glossary, describes bumaga sinyaya shit'yo as a type of cotton material.
5 Materialy, 109. Pamyatniki, XXII, 643, 276, 642. TSGADA, fond 214, op.1, op.1, kn. 588, list

36a. Ziyaev, Ekonomicheskie svyazi, 50.
6 lerusalimskaya, "K slozheniyu", 5, says the silk variety had 14-19 threads in the warp and 26-36 in
the weft. Klein, 68, 70, insists that zenden' was not silk, but cotton, and that it was a little thicker
than mitkal’, mitkal' having 32-48 threads for the warp and 36-50 for the weft. Chulkov, II, ii,
58-9, says zenden' was called rengen or shar in the eighteenth century. Fekhner, 75. Mukminova,
Ocherki, 58-62, believes that the term zenden' covered a variety of materials. Savvaitov.
Inostrantsev, 084 says that in Muscovy zenden' was silk. Rumyantsev, 444, describes it as made

either of silk or cotton.

7 Materialy, 376, 342-3, 350-1, 356, 358, 362-3, 376 and glossary. The exact length of a konets of
zenden' is not given here, as it is said to have been a general term meaning a ‘piece’, a length, a
roll. TSGADA, fond 214, op.1, kn. 254, listy 44b, 141b. Although no length is specified for the
zenden' quoted here at 180 den‘gi, it is clear from the context that this must be a konets 10 arshin

364

Merchandise

carried by individual merchants ranged from as little as 17 lengths to as much as
2,761 lengths, which was taken to Kazan' in 1619 by a certain Khozya Maksyut,
together with a sizeable selection of other goods, while his servant took over as many
as 40 triple zenden' of his own.® As for ready-made garments, merchants generally
carried a maximum of 2 to 4 zenden' shirts or caftans, but a single Bukharan
merchant is known to have brought 40 zenden' azyam' to Tara in 1654.9

c. Karbas/buz/bazz, the Russian byaz', was generally made in the khanate, although
there also seems to have been a Chinese variety of which sizeable quantities were
delivered in Tobol'sk between 1670 and 1672.!° It was plain, strong and warm,
could be glazed or unglazed, and was available in three widths - narrow at 3-8 den'gi,
medium at 10 den'gi, wide at 12 den'gi per arshin.1! Chinese byaz' was no dearer
than wide byaz' in Tyumen' in 1674, a length of 7.45 metres (10.5 arshin) being
quoted at 126 den'gi (i.e., 12 den'gi per arshin). Nothing, however, can be said with
any certainty about the glazed variety, for, although a price of 160 den'gi per length
was quoted per piece, no indication was given as to the number of arshins in a
piece.12
According to Klein byaz' was very thick and had a ‘nap’ produced by making the
warp thinner than the weft. It was either bleached pure white or dyed into seven or
more single colours, including black, purple, grey and brown, but not red.!3 Like
zenden' it was used for caftans, shirts and linings, but it was also thought ideal for
maps, the Remezov map of Siberia of 1696-1701 being drawn on white byaz'.!4
When dyed, karbas was turned into tablecloths, sheets, bags, bandages and
bedspreads, and if embroidered with gold, it became the elegant wrap (shirinka)

(7.10 metre) long. According to Fekhner, 76, materials were either sold by the arshin (28
inches/71 cm.) or by the kosyak, which was sufficient for a full-length dress or robe, and which
varied between 5 and 9 arshins (355-639 cm.). Klein, 68, says zenden' sold in Muscovy at 10
den'gi per arshin. TsGADA, fond 214, op.1, kn. 588, listy 37b, 40a, 41a, 52b. In 1674 the

Tyumen’ Customs officials appraised double zenden' (dyumendi) and triple zenden' (here called
semendi) far higher than the market value at Yamysh fair (100 as against 50 den'gi for dyumendi
and 130 as against 80 den'gi for semendi). No doubt this was in order to maximise the return for
the benefit of the Treasury
8 Materialy, 109. Ziyaev, Ekonomicheskie svyazi, pass. Pamyatniki, XXII, 640-3.
9 Ziyaev, Ekonomicheskie svyazi, 59, 69. Pamyatniki, XXII, 277, 641, 643, 644.
10 Mahmiid b. Wali, More tain, 76, lists karbas as one of the items (produced and) sold in Shahr-i

sabz. See Materialy, 342-3 for the 185.5 lengths plus 400 (lengths?) and 190 arshins of Chinese
byaz' brought to Tobol'sk in 1670-2.
11 Although Strahlenberg, 354, insists that byaz' was white and unglazed in the early eighteenth
century, a glazed variety was certainly taken to Muscovy and Siberia in the seventeenth century.
See Pamyatniki (XXII, 640, 643) for the glazed variety. Materialy, 376. In the tables for 163972 the market value of a length of glazed byaz' is given as 80-120 den'gi and its Customs
valuation as 120-160 den'gi, or rather more than a length of narrow glazed byaz' which was valued
at 96 den'gi. Vilkov, Remeslo, table 29, gives the market price of a length of wide glazed byaz' as
100-200 den'gi in Tobol'sk in 1639-40. TsGADA, fond 214, op.1, kn. 588, listy 38a-b, 40b,
52b. In 1674 the price of a length of narrow byaz' was 60 den'gi in Tyumen’ and Yamysh, as
against 160 den'gi for a length of glazed byaz’.

12 Thid., 37a, 38a.

13 Klein, 70. Materialy,

376. Mukminova,

Ocherki, 46-48, insists that one should not take

literally the claim that karbas was dyed into 72 colours, 72 only meaning ‘many’ in this context.

14 Baddeley, I, 156. Bakhrushin, "G.F.Miller", 7.

365

Bukharan trade

worn by Muscovite women.!5

Karbas was transported in lesser quantities than zenden'. Individuals generally
seem to have carried 6 to 50 lengths apiece. However, according to the Tobol'sk
Customs records a total of 48,298 metres of byaz' plus 1,491 lengths reached the
town during 1639-40.16

d. Qadak, the Russian kindyak,!7 was a sort of unpatterned calico woven like linen,
the warp being slightly thinner than the weft at 32-48 threads as against 36-50
threads.!8 Qadak was far thinner than karbas, being nearly transparent according to
Klein. It was called chabtar (mitkal' in Russian) when undyed,!9 gumash when

dyed red,2° and qadak when dyed in other colours. In Muscovy the term kindyak was

sometimes used even for the red variety, and there may have been a mottled variety

which the Kazan' voevoda called tsvetnoi in 1616.7!
Kindyak was used for lining shrouds and Church vestments, and also for making
caftans, shirts and bedspreads, which were sometimes exported ready-made. Only
small quantities of undyed kindyak and qumash appear to have been sent to Siberia
where they were less popular than the sturdier byaz' or zenden’, and where they seem
to have cost a little less, at 120 den'gi per piece, than the dearer glazed byaz'.22
According to the records available only about 100 pieces of qumash were imported to
Tobol'sk in 1639-72 and Tara in 1637-92, but the quantities imported into Kazan’ in
1616 and 1619 ranged between 70 and 330 pieces per merchant, plus 2 to 3 kindyak
shirts. A certain Khwajah Ibrahim even took there as many as 1,430 lengths of
coloured kindyak in 1616.73

e. Chit/basma, the Russian vyboika, was a sort of chintz. According to Mukminova
it was identical to sitets and consisted of unglazed karbas printed over with a flowery
or leafy pattern. This was a very difficult process and several operations were
involved. The material was heated, soaked in a special sort of buzjang, the vegetable
dye which generally turned it black, and dried. The pattern was then applied with a
die, after which the material was boiled, placed in a solution of boiling dye for an
exact number of minutes, and finally rinsed under running water. Other definitions of
vyboika are substantially different. The twentieth-century historian Klein describes it
15 Chulkov, III, ii, 61. Mukminova, Ocherki, 47. Pamyatniki, XXII, 278, 641. Savvaitov.

16 Ziyaev, Ekonomicheskie svyazi, 50, 66, 69. See Tobol’sk, 1, for ‘old’ Bukharan byaz' and other
Bukharan materials found in a Tobol'sk church in 1624. Materialy, 342. Vilkov, Remeslo, table
21, lists 420 pieces less in the total byaz' delivery to Tobol'sk for 1639-40.

17 Materialy, 168, 426.
18 Klein, 70. Materialy, 454.

19 Klein, 69. Materialy, 168, 427, 456.
20 Lantzeff, 152, calls this ‘red fustian’. Savvaitov describes kumash as Bukharan material. Fekhner,
73, 75. Materialy, 454.
21 Pamyatniki, Il, 276. Rumyantsev, 444. Kurts, "Sochinenie", 151. Here kindyak is described as
printed, but it is generally said to be unpatterned. Klein, 70. Materialy, 454.
22 Materialy, 379. Vilkov, Remeslo, table 29, gives the value of qumash in Siberia as 100 den'gi
per piece. But if we are to believe Mahmid b. Wali (Ethé), 269b, a piece of qumash cost 55.5

tanga in the Khanate in 1639, which meant that it should have cost 12 times as much in

Muscovy, the exchange rate between the tanga and the den'gi being 1 to 12 at aroud that time. See
further in Burton Bukharan trade, 87.

23 Materialy, 344, 350, 135. Vilkov, Remeslo, table 21. Pamyatniki, XXII, 276-8, 642-3.

366

Merchandise

as a patterned kindyak and says it was thicker than sitets. The seventeenth-century
traveller Kilburger also equated vyboika with kindyak. However, he listed leafpatterned (travchataya) vyboika separately, as a rather expensive variety which sold
in Muscovy at 9 to 10 kopecks/18-20 den'gi per arshin (71 cm) and which generally

originated in Holland. 24

Vyboika was made in different colours, the cheapest being dark blue, and the
dearest, according to Mukminova, being red. Other varieties were mottled and there
was also a ‘seven colours chit’. It was used for caftans, Church vestments,
tablecloths, sheets and curtains.25
Mukminova mentions several specialist workshops for the preparation of chit in
sixteenth-century Samarqand, but traces none in Bukhara for the same period. This
may have changed in the seventeenth century, for ‘wide Bukharan vyboika’ and
‘narrow Bukharan vyboika’ are mentioned in Siberian Customs records, a single
Bukharan declaring 180 lengths of the narrow variety in Tomsk in 1653. However, it
is possible that the term ‘Bukharan’ was used loosely, either to indicate items from
the khanate in general, or else simply to denote goods which were brought to Siberia
by the merchants of the khanate.
Vyboika was far more popular in Siberia than in Muscovy, where the Duch leafpatterned variety was preferred. In Siberia it sold at about the same price as byaz' and
the cheaper varieties of zenden’. It usually fetched between 48 and 80 den'gi per piece
(konets) but was valued far higher by Customs officials (between 78 and 360 den'gi).
The wider variety was worth about twice as much as the narrower one, as in
Yeniseisk where the price of wide vyboika went down from 30 den'gi per arshin in
1649 to 7 den'gi in 1687, with a corresponding decrease in price for the narrow one

from 12 to 4 den'gi.2°The length of a konets of vyboika was always 10 arshin (7.25
yards) in Yeniseisk, irrespective of its width. As for quantities carried, individual
merchants are known to have taken as little as 2 to 26 pieces to Muscovy in 1616-9

and as much as 30 to 380 lengths to Siberia in the 1650s.27
f. Chaldar/chavdar/chardar. This was glazed white cotton produced in the khanate
and also by the Qalmag tribes. It is not known whether it differed substantially or at
all from chibtar/mitkal', which morphologically resembles the word chavdar and
which, like this type of material, was thinner than byaz' (karbas) and always white.28
Nor does the fact that glazed mitkal' and “chevdar’ are entered separately in the Tara
Customs records prove conclusively that they were different, for the two entries are
nearly 60 years apart.29 In any case, according to the Muscovite writer and merchant
Chulkov, there were three qualities of chaldar in the eighteenth century which he
24 Mukminova, Ocherki, 63-67. Yuldashev, "K voprosu 0 remeslennom proisvodstve", 34. Klein,
70. Kurts, "Sochinenie", 151.
25 Mukminova, as above. Tobol'sk, 1-10. Kurts, as above. Bakhrushin, "Sibirskie sluzhilye

Tatary", 64.
26 Materialy, 342-3, 350-1, 379. The market price per arshin of the narrow type is given by Vilkov
(Remeslo, table 29) as 6 den'gi in Tobol'sk between 1639 and 1669, but it was valued at Tyumen’

Customs in 1674 at 16 den'gi per arshin. TSGADA, fond 214, op.1, kn. 588, list 38a. For prices
in Yeniseisk, see TSGADA, fond 214, op.1, kn. 254, listy 44b, 98b, 144b. In 1588-9 the price of
a piece 12 cubits long and less than one cubit wide was 3 tanga in Samarqand. Fitrat, no.58.
27 Pamyatniki, XXII, 276, 642-4. Ziyaev, Ekonomicheskie svyazi, 69, 64.

28 Potanin, "O karavannoi torgovle", 47.
29 Materialy, 460, 350-1. The mitkal' entry relates to 1637-8, the one for chevdar relates to 1696-7.

367

Bukharan trade

compares to vyboika in price and quality. He lists them among the Qalmaq and
Bukharan goods taken to China through Kiakhta and gives their price in Tomsk as 30
to 40 den'gi for the poorest quality which sold in 8 arshin (5.6 metres) lengths, 70 to
80 den'gi for the most popular khan-chaldar which sold in 9 arshin (6.3 metres)
lengths, and 90 to 100 den'gi for the best quality sham-chaldar which sold in 13
arshin (9.2 metres) lengths.39
g. The material which was called kiseya in Muscovy and Siberia was a type of cotton
muslin made of unspun thread which was thicker than modern muslin and probably

undyed.3! The cheapest variety of this, called polukiseya, was popular in Siberia,
where between 20 and 60 pieces were delivered by individual merchants in 1660.32
Its market price in Tobol'sk was 80 den'gi per piece in 1655-6.33

h. Sata was a sort of sateen of which small quantities were taken to Siberia, and
whose market price was 70 den'gi per piece.34
i. Kitaika, a type of Chinese cotton, was variously described by contemporaries. In
an early seventeenth-century manual for Muscovite traders kitaika was said to be
about 35 cm wide and was likened to ‘the worst type of taffeta’. Merchants were
accordingly told to pay no more than 2 to 3 altyn per arshin (12 to 18 den'gi for 71
cm). In 1673 the Swedish observer Kilburger called it a strong vyboika, adding,
however, that it was unpatterned, either white or coloured, and that it sold in pieces

exactly 8.5 arshins (6.04 metres) long.3> This is contradicted both by the Customs
records for Tomsk for 1680 where its length is given as 11.1 arshin (7.8 metres) and
by the Tyumen’ records of 1674 in which a piece of wide kitaika is said to be 8 arshin
(5.68 metres) long, whereas narrow kitaika was 6.5 arshin (4.62 metres) long.
Strahlenberg, who was in Russia around 1715 and who described it as ‘a sort of
Callico of diverse Colours...used both for Mens and Womens Apparel’, gives two
other lengths: - 9.7 metres for the slightly wider and better quality odintsovaya, and
‘about 20 ells’ (22.7 metres) for the ‘somewhat

coarser,

but more

durable’

tyumovaya.3®
Kitaika was very strong and reasonable in cost, and as such very popular in
Siberia. Its market price in Tobol'sk in 1668-70 was apparently 6-8 den'gi per arshin
for the medium width and 8-10 den'gi for the widest, but in Tyumen’ it was assessed
in 1674 at either 14 or 20 den'gi . Three different widths are given by Vilkov for the
Tobol'sk market,37 and it was made into shirts and caftans. Single merchants are

30 Chulkov, II, ii, 60-61.
31 Materialy, 454, 350-1, 358, 363. Klein, 70.
32 Ziyaev, Ekonomicheskie svyazi, 35.

33 Vilkov, Remeslo, table 29.
34 Materialy, 458, 350-1, 377.

35 Sakharov, 128. Kurts, "Sochinenie", 153.
36 Golovachev,

149. TsGADA,

fond 214, op.1, kn. 588, list 37a. Strahlenberg,

395. Vilkov,

Remeslo, 191n, gives the slightly shorter length of 10 arshins (7.1 metres). Kitaika is also
mentioned in Beschreibung, 20, 22; Spasskii, Sibirskii Vestnik, XVII, kn.3, 152; Titov, 78,

136; and in Lange, 51n, where it is described as ‘une sorte de toile de coton lustrée trés forte et

serrée, qu'on fait de toutes sortes de Couleurs’.

37 Vilkov, Remeslo, table 29. The three widths quoted here were bol ‘shaya, srednyaya and uzkaya
tolstaya, i.e. big, middling, narrow and thick. TsGADA,

368

fond 214, op. 1, kn. 588, listy 38a,

Merchandise

known to have carried between 80 and 960 pieces of kitaika, and a record total of
10,720 pieces reached Tara during 1666-7.38
j. Other Chinese cottons were rednina, a type of coarse, thin canvas, and daba,

which was similar to byaz' and which sold in a variety of colours.39

k. Bukharans also carried a variety of ready-made cotton goods such as caftans,
shirts, curtains and tablecloths. The average price of a Bukharan curtain in
seventeenth century Siberia seems to have been 80 den'gi, although 1.5 roubles (300
den'gi) was quoted in the Yeniseisk price list of 1649. Narrow vyboika was used for
these curtains, the pattern being yellow flowers on a red background, with a
border.4° The quantities taken to Siberia by individual merchants are not known,*4!
but one merchant took as many as 25 to Kazan' in 1619. The tablecloths transported
by Bukharans cost 30-50 den'gi apiece. They were often dark blue and were carried
in quantities varying from 20 to 60.42 Other ready-made items included coverlets
lined with byaz' or camel hair, together with large quantities of sashes or
cummerbunds made in Bukhara and China, which might be plain, striped or checked.
Khwajah Maksyut, who took a very large quantity of zenden' to Kazan' in 1616, also
carried 412 sashes, or the largest number found to have been carried by an individual
merchant, and his enterprising servant followed suit with as many as 60 sashes.43
The price of a cotton sash varied between 40 and 80 den'gi in Tara and Tobol'sk and

between 16 and 140 den'gi in Yeniseisk.4
2. Cotton mixtures. These were as follows:

a. Qutni/khutna, the Russian kutnya/kurtnya. This was a mixture of silk and cotton
made in the khanate and in other eastern countries. It had a silk warp and a thick
cotton weft clearly visible on the wrong side. It apparently looked like satin but felt
harsher to the touch and was generally striped, although plain (zendennaya) kutnya
and printed (vyboichataya) kutnya also existed.4> In Muscovy and Siberia kutnya was
used for padding jackets and for making or lining caftans, but it was also imported
ready-made into caftans.4© Quantities taken to Tobol'sk in the seventeenth century

42b, 52b. Materialy, 376. Here Customs prices of 10-18 den'gi are given for an arshin of
unspecified width.
38 Vilkov, Remeslo, table 21. Ziyaev, Ekonomicheskie svyazi, 70, 34. Materialy, 344-5, 350-1.
39 Materialy, 458, 344, 452. Vilkov, Remeslo, 212.
40 Materialy, 378. Vilkov, Remeslo, table 29. Here a lower price of 60 den'gi is quoted for the
Tobol'sk market in 1655-6. TsGADA, fond 214, op.1, kn. 254, listy 98b, 44b. Yuldashev, "K
voprosu 0 remeslennom proisvodstve", 33. Chulkoy, III, ii, 61.

41 We only know that two ot the merchants who were robbed on leaving Irkutsk in 1688 had been
carrying a total of four curtains. Chimitdorzhiev, "K istorii".
42 Ziyaev, Ekonomicheskie

svyazi, 34-36.

43 Chulkov, Ill, ii, 61-62. Pamyatniki, XXII, 642, 643. TsGADA, fond 214, op.1, kn. 588, listy

35b-36b. Materialy, 455, 350, 376-7, 109. Vilkov, Remesio, table 21.
44 yaterialy, 377. Vilkov, Remeslo, table 29. TSGADA, fond 214, op.1, kn. 254, listy 48b, 153a;
see also kn. 588, list 38b, for a price of 70 den'gi entered in Tyumen’ in 1674.

45 Materialy, 455, 377.
46 Savvaitov. Klein, 68. Pamyatniki, XXII, 643. The nineteenth century traveller Hagemeister

369

Bukharan trade

ranged from 3 to 154 lengths in one year and they sold at 200-300 den’gi (1-2
roubles) per konets.47
b. Alacha, the Russian pestred'. This material, woven in Bukhara and in Samarqand,
was made of cotton and either hemp or silk. Savvaitov and Vvedenskii say that one of
the threads was always white, but Mukminova insists that the stripes could be either
light or dark, against a weft which was usually dark blue.4® Pestred' was popular in
Muscovy and also in Tara and Tobol'sk, as it was strong and no dearer than zenden’.
In Yeniseisk the narrow variety sold at 20 den'gi per arshin in lengths of 20 arshin
(14.20 m). Quantities carried by individual merchants to Kazan’ in 1616-9 ranged
from 7 to 108 pieces. The quantities recorded for Siberia were 2 to 5 pieces in 1609,

with several entries of 20 pieces per merchant in 1660.4?
c. Mukhayyar was an expensive mixture of cotton, silk and wool which, according
to Savvaitov, was made in the khanate in green, black and white. It was used in

Muscovy for making fur-lined coats for the Tsar and his Court, and it sold at 40

den'gi per arshin.5°
d. Finally some of the sashes and muslin transported by Bukharans were made of a
mixture of cotton, silk and wool.5! Sashes were an important item of apparel, being
used to secure the long caftans then used by men and women. Sometimes they were
specially made with a pouch to hold food, and prices could be quite high. Quantities
of 34 to 183 are known to have been carried to Muscovy by single merchants and
Vilkov quotes 100 to 120 den'gi for a single part-silk sash in Tobol'sk in 1639-40
and 1653, a price which is not dissimilar to that of cotton sashes.>2

3. Silks

a. Raw silk (paf) often figured among the goods carried.53 Bukharan merchants took
to Muscovy not only raw silk from the khanate, but also Turkish, Iranian and Chinese
silk. During the seventeenth century total yearly deliveries to Tara and Tobol'sk
ranged between 1 Ib (409.5 gr) and 13 pud (212.9 kg), but in 1616 and 1619

wrote (131) that kutnya was most long lasting and described aladja as striped but less tightly
woven than kutnya.

47 Vilkov, Remeslo, Tables 21, 29. Materialy, 344, 377.
48 See Materialy,

457; Rumyantsev, 446; and Bakhrushin, Nauchnye

mention of hemp. See Mukminova,

trudy, IV, Slovar', for

Ocherki, 51-52, for mention of silk. Fekhner, 73, says

pestryad was made of various coloured cotton threads. See also Savvaitov and the lexicon
appended to Vvedenskii, Torgovyi dom.
49 Materialy, 109. TSGADA, fond 214, op.1, kn. 254, list 44b. Ziyaev, Ekonomicheskie

svyazi,

34, 36, 53.
50 Savvaitov. Materialy, 456. Here mukhoyar is described as Arab material.

51 Pamyatniki, XXII, 277, 642. Materialy, 455. Vilkov, Remeslo, table 21.

52 Vilkov, Remeslo, table 29. See TSGADA, fond 214, op.1, kn. 264, listy 48, 153a, for the price
of cotton sashes in Yeniseisk, which fell in price rather more drastically than other goods, from

140 in 1649 to 16 den'gi in 1687. In Tyumen’, on the other hand, (TsGADA, fond 214, op.1, kn.

588, list 38b) cotton sashes were valued at 70 den'gi in 1674.

53 TsGADA, fond 109, op.1, 1669-75, no.1, 32a.

370

Merchandise

individual merchants are known to have carried between 1 ansyr (545 gr) and 53
ansyr (28.85 kg) of raw silk, which they delivered in Kazan'.54

b. Dara’i the Russian doroga/dorogi, was similar to taffeta, but appears to have been
cheaper and to have always had at least a mildly striped appearance. According to
Klein this was achieved in several ways, by using different coloured threads in the
warp and the weft, by making the warp slightly thicker than the weft, or by using
coloured threads alternately in the warp. Klein explains that in addition to being

striped dara’i could be flowered or checked, and might even look like watered silk.55
Other writers, such as Chulkov and Potanin, describe dara’i as either plain or striped,
but reject the claim that it could be patterned.5 Chulkov adds that, although the length
of a piece varied, dara’i was always 3/4 arshin wide (in the early eighteenth century).
In seventeenth century Siberia dara’i was valued by Tara and Tobol'sk Customs
officials at 2 roubles, presumably per length. As it was both versatile and moderately
priced there was a market for it both in Siberia and in Muscovy where it was delivered
by Bukharans either in pieces or ready-made into shirts and caftans, quantities
declared in Kazan’ in 1619 ranging from 2 to 21 pieces of ‘Bukharan dorogi’ per

merchant.>7
c. Kamkha/kimkha/kimkhab,

the Russian kamka, or damask, was a luxury item,

some of which was probably imported into the khanate from China and Iran. It tended
therefore to be carried by royal, rather than ordinary traders. Indeed the greater part of
Ablin's purchases in China in 1668 consisted of kamka, of which he bought 2,000

pieces.58 Kamka was tightly woven with single threads of identical thickness in the
warp and the weft, and with a reversible pattern which was created by alternating the
threads irregularly. At least two types of kamka produced in Bukhara are known to
have been exported to Siberia. In the middle of the seventeenth century the variety
called volosyanka, woven with gold or silver threads, fetched 1.5 roubles according
to Tobol'sk Customs valuations, whereas the kamka bukharskaya, which was
probably thicker and wider, fetched 3 roubles, as did Chinese kamka. Surprisingly
enough the dearest variety quoted in Tobol'sk was the solomyanka, woven with
gilded threads rather than gold, and valued at 4 roubles.59
Only small quantities of Bukharan kamka were carried to Siberia, a single
volosyanka being declared in Tobol'sk in 1657-8 and 1670-1, and a single
54 Materialy, 109, 346-7, 354-5. Pamyatniki, XXII, 276, 278, 641, 643, 644. See Ogloblin, III,
156, for Bukharan imports of silk to Moscow before 1671. Ziyaev, Ekonomicheskie svyazi, 37.
Vilkov, Remeslo, table 21.

55 Fekhner, 73. Klein, 66-67. Materialy, 453.
56 Chulkov,

III, ii, 63. Potanin,

"O karavannoi

torgovle",

50. Yuldashev,

"K voprosu

remeslennom proizvodtsve", equates shai and dorogi and says dara’i was a reversible material
containing only 50 per cent silk.

57 Materialy, 377, 344-5. Pamyatniki, XXII, 278, 642-3. TSGADA, fond 214, op.1, kn. 254, 39a40a, 96b.
58 Russko-kitaiskie otnosheniya, I, 296-7.

59 Klein, 56-58. Mukminova, Ocherki, 70-71. Fekhner, 73. Materialy, 377. Sakharov, 128. In
Muscovy solomyanka was the cheapest variety of kamka available in the early seventeenth
century. It cost 60-79 den'gi per arshin, the other varieties ranging from adamashka at 99-120
den'gi, to kufter and karmazin (crimson) which were guaranteed not to fade and which cost

between 99 and 240 den'gi.

371

Bukharan trade

solomyanka in 1649-50. The largest amount of kamka taken there in the course of a
year was 500 pieces of ‘small’ kamka delivered in 1670-1.6°
In addition to the Bukharan varieties, three different qualities of tightly woven and
fairly thick Chinese kamka were taken to Siberia by Bukharan traders, the largest
amount recorded in Tobol'sk being 60 pieces in 1669-70. Kamka was made into
shirts and outer garments, as well as rich curtains and coverlets. It was also used for

lining coats and hats.®!
d. Fita, the Russian fata, was a general term which applied, as now, to a short
length of material generally used as a turban, a woman's shawl-cum-headcover or
even as a bathrobe. In Muscovy fata could also be used to line Church shrouds.
Although the term was mostly used to describe a thin, semi-transparent silk, it could
also apply to cotton and woollen wraps.°? Both coloured and white futa were taken to
Siberia. Between 1639 and 1672 fata was valued in Tara and Tobol'sk at 50 den'gi if
white, and 60 to 80 den'gi if coloured, but in 1649 the Yeniseisk Customs officials

valued cotton fata at 200 den'gi and ‘good Bukharan-fata’ at 400 den'gi.® It seems to
have been carried in small quantities to Siberia, for the total number taken to Tobol'sk
in the seventeenth century ranged from 4 to 707 per year, but more appears to have
been taken to Muscovy, for a single merchant took 8 fata to Kazan' in 1619.94
e. Atlas, a special type of tightly woven black satin made in Bukhara, and bakhmal,
velvet made

in the khanate,

were

also carried,®>

together with

Arabian

and

Kashghariyan materials, Chinese taffeta and satin, and a variety of velvets and rich
materials woven with gold thread which originated in Europe, Egypt, Turkey and

China.®® Atlas from either Bukhara or China sold-in Yeniseisk at 100 den'gi per
arshin in 1649 and 71 den'gi in 1687. And as for the taffeta made in the khanate it
was sold, if at all, in the form of ready-made shirts. Zarbaft (Russian izarbatf, cloth

of gold), a type of silk with insertions of thin gold ribbon, which dignitaries wore for
banquets in the khanate, and which was much

valued in Muscovy,®’ does not,

however, appear in the known lists of Bukharan goods. It was probably foreign to
the khanate and therefore too expensive. Even ambassadors did not include any of
this material among their gifts. Although ambassador ‘Ali Murad's claimed that he
60 Materialy, 342-3, 350-1. Vilkov, Remesio, table 21.
61 Vilkov, Remeslo, table 21, also p. 212. Materialy, 342-3, 350-1. Savvaitov.

62 Mukminova, Ocherki, 53-56. Klein, 65. Savvaitov. Ziyaev, Ekonomicheskie svyazi, 12, says
fata could be striped.
63 The price of cotton fata in Yeniseisk had gone down to 40 den'gi by 1687.
64 Klein, 65. Materialy, 378, 344-5, 350-1, 363. Vilkov, table 29, records market prices of 40 to
80 den'gi for white fata and 15-35 den'gi for cotton fata in 1639-40. TsGADA, fond 214, op.1,
kn. 254, listy 48a, 142a. Pamyatniki, XXII, 642.

65 Ziyaev, Ekonomicheskie svyazi, 67. Some 5 metres of atlas were sold in Tyumen’ in 1683.
Purchas, XIII, 232. Mukminova,

Ocherki, 69-70. TsGADA, fond 214, op.1, kn. 254, list 43b.

Atlas cost 100 den'gi per arshin in Yeniseisk in 1649. Vilkov, Remeslo, 213.

66 Mukminova,

Sotsial'naya

diferentsiatsiya,

113. Muhammad

Pamyatniki, XXII, 276, 278, 643, 644. Ziyaev, Ekonomicheskie

Yisuf Munshi, 259b, 278b.
svyazi, 61, 66.

67 TsGADA, fond 214, op.1, kn. 254, listy 43b, 98a. See Pamyatniki, XXII, 278, for mention of
13 Bukharan taffeta shirts carried by a single merchant. Mahmid b. Wali (Ethé), 255a. An outer

garment of zarbaft was worn by 500 ‘ulama‘ and clerics during a banquet in honour of Imam Quli
in early 1639. Klein, 50-51.

372

Merchandise

had brought 81 pieces of zarbaft of various colours for the Tsar in 1676 and had been
robbed of them by the Cossacks, his claim turned out to be untrue. 68
4. Flaxen

material

The Russian mel’, a type of material made of flax and generally used as lining
material, was also carried by Bukharan merchants, although rather sporadically, the
largest quantity recorded being 351 pieces taken to Tobol'sk during 1657-8. Earlier,
in 1585, ambassador Muhammad ‘Ali delivered 200 pieces to Tsar Fedor.®9
5. Woollens

European woollen materials made in Poland, England and Muscovy were much
sought after by Bukharan traders. They were purchased either in Muscovy and
Siberia, or else in the khanate from Muscovite travellers. Little is known about the

quantities involved or about the specific differences between them, but they appear to
have ranged from canvas and coarse, undyed cloth, to English cloth and stamed, a
cross-stitch variety. In 1681 one Bukharan merchant purchased two short lengths of
scarlet and about 5.50 metres of green stamed. The largest quantity of woollens
carried by single merchants in the records available is a consignment of 1,400
arshin/994 metres of canvas which a certain Asenov (Hasan?) took from Tobol'sk to

Tara in 1654, and from there, presumably, to Bukhara.”°And it is known that in 1674
a Bukharan

resident bought 10 portishch (about 40 arshin or 28.40 metres) of

Hamburg cloth in Tomsk for 20 roubles.71

II Leather and hides
1. Saf'yan

goatskins.

Goatskins finely worked after the manner of the Moroccan town of Safi were taken to
Muscovy where they were called saf‘yan. They were dyed in different colours,
including black. Their value in Siberia is only known approximately from the tables
of Customs and market prices compiled by modern historians, for there is no
indication whether the figures quoted (a Customs value of 320 den'gi for the years
1639 to 1672, market prices of 150 den'gi in 1655-6 and 120 den'gi in 1669-70)
apply to a single hide, a pair of hides or a pud.’” More precise figures are available
for Moscow where saf'yan was assessed differently according to its colour and
origin, Persian saf'yan being considered inferior to the Turkish and Tatar varieties.

68 Materialy, 236, 231n.
69 Savvaitov.

Vilkov, Remeslo, table 21. Materialy, 455, 98, 296, 342-3, 350-1, 363. See

Pamyatniki, XXII, 643, for a caftan made of mel’,

70 Materialy, 366-7, 459. Ziyaev, Ekonomicheskie svyazi, 55, 65.
71 According to Kostomarov, 288, 290, a portischch was about 4 arshin long, but a polovinka
could vary in length between 20 and 25 arshin. TsSGADA, fond 214, op.1, kn. 588, list 494a.
Ibid., kn. 254, listy 36a-b. In 1649 the various widths of Hamburg cloth available in Yeniseisk
fetched respectively 28, 22 and 20 roubles per polovinka, and a polovinka was taken to be 20
arshin long.
72 Materialy, 378. Vilkov, Remeslo, table 29.

373

Bukharan trade

However, it is not known whether Bukharan saf'yan was bracketed with Persian
saf'yan, or more highly valued. In 1652 De Rodes noted that Persian saf'yan was
sold by weight in Moscow at 3 den'gi per lb, whereas ‘Tatar saf'yan’ and Turkish

saf'yan were sold by the pair at 140 den'gi and 200 den'gi (1 rouble) respectively.”

Prices had risen in 1674, for coloured saf'yan then fetched between 160 and 280
den'gi a pair, and the more valuable white saf'yan sold at 800 den'gi (4 roubles) a
pair.”4 Either because they were difficult to produce or because there was no wealthy
or aristocratic class in Siberia to purchase them, the number of saf'yan hides taken to
Tara or Tobol'sk in any one year was not high. It did not generally exceed 20, except
in 1670-1 when a record number of 320 were inspected by Customs officials in

Tobol'sk.75
2. Kozlina (pl. kozliny) or goat hides.
Ordinary goat hides were far cheaper, at least in Siberia. They were assessed at 19 to
22 den'gi apiece and could fetch as little as 12 den'gi in the Tobol'sk market-place,
according to the figure given by Vilkov for 1655-6. Sometimes they were given a
very special finish, as in the case of the 13 goatskins with an expensive watered silk
finish which were taken to Kazan' in 1619.76 The average quantities taken to Tara
and Tobol'sk by individual merchants ranged between 20 and 40, and a total of 175
reached Tobol'sk in 1649-50. In the absence of specific records it is not possible to
hazard a guess at present as to average quantities carried to Muscovy, but one
merchant is known to have delivered 150 goatskins to Kazan’ in 1616. Goatskins
trousers were also taken to Siberia where they were expected to fetch between 40 and
90 den'gi.”7
3. Kozha_

bukharskaya.

This was probably dried calf hide. It was taken both to Muscovy and to Siberia, and it

fetched 80 den'gi in Muscovy in 1677-8.78
4. Yuft.

Muscovite yuft was high on the Bukharan shopping list. The term yuft was generally
used for hides which had been immersed in a mixture of lime and ashes to kill the
bacteria and remove the hairs, then tanned in wood pulp and kvass (rye-beer), before
being washed, covered with salt and impregnated with tar. Although at this Stage a

7 Kurts, "Sostoyanie", 117. The prices listed were actually 60 roubles per 100 pud, and 70 and 100
roubles per 100 pairs.

74 Kurts, "Sochinenie", 151.
75 Materialy, 352-3, 358-9, 362, 346-7. Vilkov, Remeslo, table 21.

76 Materialy, 378. Vilkov, Remeslo, table 29. Pamyatniki, XXII, 643.
17 Materialy, 346-7, 352-3, 344-5, 377. Pamyatniki, XXII, 276. Ziyaev, Ekonomicheskie svyazi,
34, 59, 35.

78 Yakovlev, III, 365 list 219, 415 list 48, 419 list 59, 487 list 31b, 493 list 44b, 497 list 56a. See
Pamyatniki, XXII, 641, for 15 dried hides taken by one merchant to Kazan' in 1619. In 1630 as

many as 1,104 so-called ‘Bukharan cow hides’ were sold in Arkhangel'sk by Nikitnikov, one of
the most important merchants of Moscow, but it is not known whether they were dried or salted.
Bushkovitch, 68.

374

Merchandise

horse's hide was considered ready,’9 three more stages were necessary to complete
the preparation of an ox hide. It had to be immersed in a mixture of heated Brazil
wood, alum and ashes, then it was dried, and finally it was beaten out with notched

beaters which gave it a criss-cross appearance. The main centre for the production of
yuft was Kazan’, and it had a very strong, distinctive smell. The eighteenth century
Scottish doctor and botanist John Bell, who spent some thirty years in Muscovy,
thought that the smell was due to the fact that ‘instead of oil... a kind of tar’ was
used, which ‘was extracted by fire from the bark of the birch-tree’. The initial outlay
for the preparation of the yuft was small, since only a few wooden tubs were needed
for soaking the hides, but the whole process took 5 to 6 months. When the hides
were ready they were dyed ‘with logwood’ according to Bell, or with plants,

according to Fekhner, the favourite colour being red.80
The cost of yufts was probably greater in Siberia than in Muscovy, because
production only started there some time after 1650, whereas the Muscovite production
was several centuries old, dating back to the days of the Bulgars. However, their
relative costs cannot be compared, as Siberian prices are quoted per item whereas
Moscow prices related to weight. Thus ‘small red yufts’ and red yufts in general cost
2 roubles apiece in Siberia in the 1670s and 1680s,8! whereas in Moscow 1 pud of

red yuft cost 8.8 roubles in 1674.82 From the information available it seems that
individual Bukharans purchased anything between 4 and 20 yufts in Siberia, and
between 2 and 70 in Muscovy, and it is known that a single merchant took back 100

red calf's yufts from Astrakhan in 1681.83
5. Elk,

chamois,

horse

hides.

Elk hides, chamois leather from the khanate, dressed horse hides and a few leather
coats, sometimes made of horse-leather, were also carried by Bukharans to Siberia.

Only isolated figures are available for these items. Thus we know that a total of 400
elk hides were brought to Tara in 1657-8, that altogether 70 pieces of chamois
reached Tobol'sk in 1639-40, of which 39 were brought by a single merchant and
came from Bukhara. We also know that dressed horse hides came to Tara in
quantities ranging between 20 and 265 per year, and that a total of 4 pairs of trousers
and 7 coats made of horse hide were inspected by Tara Customs officials during
1648-9,84

79 Falk, as quoted in Vilkov, Remeslo, 32-35.
80 Bell, A journey...to Isfahan, 22. Bazilevich, "Kollektivnye chelobitye", 99. Fekhner, 52.
81 Ziyaev, Ekonomicheskie svyazi, 56. TSGADA, fond 214, op.1, kn. 254, list 55b. Prices in
Yeniseisk were higher, at least in 1649: small ones fetched 3 roubles, medium fetched 4 and large

fetched 5 roubles.
82 Kurts, "Sochinenie", 109. The price had gone up from 6 roubles in 1652. Kurts, "Sostoyanie",
117. In a book of reference written for Muscovite merchants in 1575 and 1610, the price of red
yuft was given as ‘half a rouble, 40 altyn or 2 roubles (100, 240 or 400 den'gi) according to the
(quality of) the goods’, but it is not clear whether this was the price of a single hide.
83 Ziyaev, Ekonomicheskie svyazi, 56, 65. Materialy, 366-7.
84 Materialy, 346-7, 352-3, 363. Vilkov, Remeslo,

leather.

375

table 29, mentions red Bukharan chamois

Bukharan trade

III

Furs

1. Lambskins

The Russian merlushka, better known in the West as Persian lamb or Astrakhan fur,

was often carried by Bukharans. There were two types of these lambskins, both of

which were obtained either from the unborn or from the newly-born lamb.85 Those
from the khanate, and in particular the Qarakil lambskins, were most highly prized,
as being softer, glossier and more beautiful than either the longer-haired Qalmaq and
Turkmen, or the tightly-curled Persian varieties.
In the eighteenth century Bell said Bukharan lambskins fetched 3 times as much
as the Qalmaq ones. But Strahlenberg, who visited Muscovy in 1715-25, noted a
much bigger difference in their market values. He said that Bukharan lambskins, in
which the ‘Hair or Wool lies flat, and, as it were, in Waves’, fetched 4-6 roubles
(800-1,200 den'gi) each, whereas the Karagan and Qalmagq varieties fetched only 3040 kopecks (40-80 den'gi). According to Chulkov,-who wrote in 1756, Bukharan
lambskins, which he called ‘Turkmen baranki’, were very curly. He gave their point
of entry into Muscovy as Astrakhan, adding that sales in Siberia were a recent
development in his day. The difference in value between these lambskins and the
Qalmaq ones was still sizeable in his day, a single Bukharan skin fetching 200-300
den'gi wholesale and 400 retail, whereas a Qalmaq skin fetched only 24-36 den'gi. In
view of this, and since lambskins only fetched around 6 den'gi apiece in seventeenthcentury Siberia, it seems fairly safe to assume that the ones which Bukharans took
there must have been of the Qalmagq variety.8¢
Offcuts of Bukharan lambskins, on the other hand, may have reached Siberia

where, under the name of meshina bukharskaya , they were valued at the same price
as the cheaper type of chamois leather, at 3 altyn 1 den'gi (19 den'gi) per unit. It is

not clear, however, whether the unit in question was a lb, a pud or a sack.87
Lambskins were available in a variety of colours. Grey, black, and even green are
mentioned by the various sources consulted, the green ones, according to Mahmid b.

Wali, coming from Nakhshab/Qarshi.88They were used ‘for the lining of coats and
the turning up of hats’, according to Bell. Individual merchants carried between 20
and 220 lambskins to Siberia, and a grand total of 15,030 Qalmaq lambskins reached
Tara in 1689. As for the meshina bukharskaya, the largest quantity recorded was 131

units brought to Tobol'sk in 1644-5.89
2. Sheepskins.
At 19 den'gi apiece sheepskins were only a little over three times dearer than Qalmaq
lambskins in seventeenth century Siberia and, perhaps because they were heavier and
the margin of profit was smaller, very few actually got there. It is not known whether

85 Strahlenberg, 410-1. Bell, "Isfahan", 46.
86 Tbid., 47. Strahlenberg, 410-1. Chulkov, III, ii, 65-66. Materialy, 378. Vilkov, Remeslo, table

29.

87 Materialy, 378.
88 Mahmid b. Wali, More tain, 79-80.
89 Bell, "Isfahan", 46. Ziyaev, Ekonomicheskie

svyazi, 34-36, 59, 61. Materialy, 346-7, 352-3,

358, 362-3. A total of 1,014 lambskins were taken to Tobol'sk in 1640 by the merchants who
travelled there with Bukharan ambassador Khozziyan.

376

Merchandise

those which did reach Siberia came from Bukhara or from the Qalmaq, but the yearly
quantities declared in Tara and Tobol'sk ranged from 1 to 260, and a single merchant
brought a total of four to Tyumen' in 1647. Sheepskin coats seem to have been more
popular, perhaps because they were valued by Siberian Customs officials at 140-220
den'gi each and could be sold at a greater profit. However, although 80 such coats
were taken to Tobol'sk in 1660 by three merchants, yearly quantities delivered there
could be much lower. Thus only 3 are listed for 1649-50, and except for 1657-8
when a record number of 130 was entered, the usual figures ranged between 15 and
’
51 90

3. Ermine

and squirrel.

Both were inexpensive, although squirrels were far cheaper at a rouble, or under a
rouble, for 100 in Yeniseisk, i.e. 2 den'gi or less apiece, whereas a single ermine pelt
cost 8-12 den'gi. Large numbers of both were bought in Siberia. Figures available for
Tobol'sk show that between 1660 and 1689 individual Bukharans bought between
100 and 500 ermine pelts each, but were not interested in ready-made ermine coats.
Out of twelve merchants who bought furs, only five bought fur coats, and only one
purchased as many as two ermine coats. More interest was shown in squirrel coats,
of which individual merchants purchased 2, 8 and 100, but this must have been
because they cost far less. Their price, which was 600 den'gi (3 roubles) in Yeniseisk
in 1649, had fallen to 360 den'gi for coats made from squirrel backs by 1687, and
200 den'gi for coats made from the less valuable fronts, although the price of ermine
coats had remained unchanged at 1,600 den'gi (8 roubles). 9!
Bukharans also took squirrel pelts from the steppes, from China, and even from
Muscovy, to sell in Siberia. In 1697-8 as many as 2,620 pelts were imported into
Tara from Central Asia, and in 1688 a group of Bukharans returning from China who
were robbed near Turinsk said they had been carrying a total of 8,812 pelts in
quantities ranging from 300 to 4,000.92 The records of this robbery are particularly
valuable as they provide detailed information about the scale of Bukharan trading
activities in and around Siberia.
4, Fox.

Many types of cheap fox pelts were carried by Bukharans. Red foxes from the
Qalmagq steppes and a smaller variety , called korsaki, for example, were taken by
them to Siberia and Kazan’. The korsaki were generally grey, but they could also be
completely white. The merchants of the khanate also dealt in Turkmen foxes. Thus
one merchant brought ‘100 poor quality red foxes and 75 korsaki’ to Tobol'sk in
1655-6, another took 37 Turkmen foxes to Kazan' in 1616. Young foxes whose fur
was shorter and rather grey (nedolis') were also taken to Siberia. Yearly
consignments to Tara and Tobol'sk ranged from 18 to 888 red foxes, 2 to 284
korsaki and 2 to 195 young foxes. A total of 6 grey-throated foxes is also entered
90 Ziyaev, Ekonomicheskie svyazi, 66, 34, 69. Materialy, 346-7, 352-3, 377-8. Vilkov, Remeslo,

tables 21 and 29, gives the value of Qalmaq sheepskins as 12-20 den'gi in 1639-40 and 14 den'gi
in 1669-70.
91 TsGADA, fond 214, op.1, kn. 254, listy 32b, 91b. Ziyaev, Ekonomicheskie svyazi, 55-56.
92 Ziyaev, Ekonomicheskie svyazi, 56-57. Materialy, 352-3. Chimitdorzhiev, "K istorii." See also

Rumyantsev 340-57, about the Turinsk incident.

SIT

Bukharan trade

among the goods imported to Tara in 1637-8.”
Fox pelts were also purchased in Siberia,” the price of a single korsak pelt in
Tobol'sk being 20 den'gi in 1686. This was far less than red fox, which cost 140
den'gi in Tara in 1657, although the cheapest pelts could cost as little as 80 to 100
den'gi in 1672, and a single Qalmaq red fox was bought at Yamyshev fair for 120
den'gi in 1674.95 The total quantities involved must have been large for, according to
Ziyaev, Bukharans spent 51.2 per cent of the ready cash brought to Siberia on furs.
On the basis of the sparse information available, all that can be said, however, is that
between 1660 and 1686 individual merchants generally bought between 14 and 70 red
foxes, between 25 and 50 polar foxes (pestsy),?® and a little less than 10 grey or
black-throated foxes at a time, although after the Turinsk robbery of 1688 one

Bukharan claimed that he had been carrying as many as 333 polar foxes.?7
In addition to complete fox pelts merchants also purchased offcuts of fox as well
as full fur coats, 2 fox fur coats being entered in the Tobol'sk Customs books for
1639-40. Other types of fur coats carried were hareskin coats which Bukharans took
to Siberia in quantities ranging from 3 to 130, the sale price of a hareskin coat made
from pelt fronts being one rouble in Tyumen’ and Tobol'sk in 1686, but half that
price in Yeniseisk a year later. Hats also seem to have been popular with Bukharan
merchants, for most of the merchants robbed outside Turinsk by the Buryats in 1688
put in a claim for one or more hats, but only one of these was specifically described

as fox. 98
5. Sables,

dark fox, marten,

beaver,

otter, wolves.

Little is known about the quantities of sables and dark brown fox handled by
Bukharan merchants, as such furs were not generally available for purchase on the
open market in Siberia. However, it is known that the merchants who were robbed
near Turinsk in 1688 were carrying between 2 and 22 whole sables each, some of

which they had bought in China. The remainder had probably been purchased from
the Qalmagq, or from any of the east Siberian tribes which paid tribute (yasak) to the
Tsar in return for his protection.
Bukharans also carried incomplete sable pelts, as did a certain K. Ovsov who
bought 80 tail-less sable pelts in Tobol'sk in 1674. They even purchased bundles of
sable ‘pieces’, with or without tails. Thus in 1689 five such bundles were acquired by
93 Materialy, 346-7, 352-3. Strahlenberg, 397, said the korsak lived in the ‘Kalmuckian deserts’
near the Caspian. Levshin, I, 132. Pamyatniki, XXII, 276. Vilkov, Remesilo, table 21, gives
figures of 40-580 red foxes and 22-276 korsaki for Bukharan imports to Tobol'sk in the

seventeenth century.
94 See below about the general prohibition relating to the purchase of dark brown and black pelts.
95 Ziyaev, Ekonomicheskie svyazi, 56, 65. Chulkoy, III, ii, 64, gives the late eighteenth century
price for a korsak as 40-50 kopecks/80-100 den'gi. Russko-kitaiskie otnosheniya, I, 300. The

dearer black or dark brown foxes suitable for export to China cost between 600 and 1,000 den'gi in
Siberia in 1672. TSGADA, fond 214, op.1, kn. 588, list 41a-b. The price of red fox in Yeniseisk
was 120 den’gi in 1649 and 80 den'gi in 1687. TSGADA, fond 214, op.1, kn.254, listy 31b, 90b.

°® Ziyaev, Ekonomicheskie svyazi, 54. Strahlenberg, 434, says that the fur of the pesets (pl.
pestsy), or Siberian fox, was light, very warm, and either white or dark brown.

97 Ziyaev, Ekonomicheskie svyazi, 55, 56. Chimidtdorzhiev, "K istorii".
°8 Materialy, 344-5. TsSGADA, fond 214, op.1, kn. 588, listy 223b, 429b. Ziyaev, Ekonomicheskie svyazi, 55-56. TSGADA, fond 214, op.1, kn. 254, 91b. Chimitdorzhiev, "K
istorii".

378

Merchandise

N. Kurmanov and 800 tail-less pieces were sold to N. Abraimov (b. Ibrahim).99
All that is known about the scale of the trade in martens in Tobol'sk is that a total
of 26 full-grown martens and 55 marten tails were brought there in 1639-40, and that
in 1649-50 two pelts, said to be from Central Asia, were presented to Customs. For

Tara the only figure is five pelts delivered in 1645-6. More detailed figures are
available for beavers and otters. A certain Rayyimov is known to have taken 16
medium otters and 10 russet beavers from Tomsk to Tobol'sk in 1674, another
merchant, Abyzov, took 3 brown beavers to the same town in 1666. Yearly figures
for beaver imports to Tobol'sk are not much larger, a total of 27 beavers being
presented for Customs inspection in 1639-40.!9° The difference in price between
martens on the one hand, and beavers and otters on the other hand, was enormous,
for between 1639 and 1672 martens were valued by the Customs inspectors of Tara
and Tobol'sk at only 50 to 80 den'gi each, as against beavers at 400 to 600 den'gi,
and otters at 400 to 500 den'gi. The price of beavers, however, went down
subsequently, for a Tomsk Bukharan brought a number of red beavers to Tyumen’ in
1674 said to be worth only 200 den'gi each, and their official value in Yeniseisk

decreased from 600 den'gi per pelt in 1649, to 200 den'gi for a small pelt and 300
den'gi for an ordinary pelt in 1689.
Finally buffalo pelts and horns were carried, as well as small numbers of lynxes,
snow-leopards and wolves, in quantities ranging from 1 to 6.191

Livestock and slaves

1. Livestock.

Cattle, sheep, goats and horses were herded over from the Qalmaq encampments to
Siberia and Muscovy. Yearly deliveries to Tobol'sk and Tara ranged from 25 to 420
goats and rams, 100 to 164 sheep, 27 to 40 oxen and 17 to 299 horses. Individual
contributions to this trade are not generally recorded, but it is known that one
merchant brought 14 cows and oxen to Tobol'sk in 1655-6, and that in 1642 traders
took between 8 and 20 horses each from Astrakhan to Moscow.!°2 Pedigree horses
from the khanate were supplied to Siberia in the days of Kuchum and they were

always in demand in China, as were camels.!©
2. Slaves
Slaves were a valuable commodity often carried by Bukharans. They were generally
99 Pamyatniki, XX, 268. Chimitdorzhiev,

"K istorii". Ziyaev, Ekonomicheskie

svyazi, 55, 56,

66.
100 yaterialy, 346-7, 352-3. Vilkov, Remeslo, tables 21, 29. Ziyaev, Ekonomicheskie

svyazi,

57, 55, 66. A total of 28 small otters was taken from Yamysh to the khanate between 1665 and

1685. See Beschreibung, 22, for a reference to Bukharan purchases of ‘sables, beavers, otters and
other furs’ in Siberia in the 1660s.
101 yaterialy, 378. TsGADA,

fond 214, op.1, kn. 588, listy 494a, 224a. TsGADA,

fond 214,

op.1, kn. 254, listy 33a, 91a. Chimitdorzhiev, "K istorii". Pamyatniki, XXII, 642.
102 Yaterialy, 348-9, 354-5, 358-9, 363. Ziyaev, Ekonomicheskie svyazi, 59. Russko-indiiskie
otnosheniya, 45.

103 Bakhrushin, "Sibirskie sluzhilye Tatary", 56. Materialy, 363. Rossabi, 73.

379

Bukharan trade

captives taken in wars and raids, or debtors unable to meet their commitments, but
they might also be children whose destitute parents needed money in order to pay
their taxes. Many were bought in Khwarazm and in the nomadic encampments which
the merchants visited, others were purchased in Astrakhan for sale in Siberia, and
vice-versa.!04 Chinese, Tatars and Qalmag, both adults and children, were supplied
to the slave marts of Tobol'sk, Tara and Astrakhan. Bukharan interest in, and
obvious capacity for, this particular type of trade were indeed so well recognised that
the periodical prohibitions which were imposed, for ethical reasons, on the Tsars'

other subjects did not often apply to Siberian residents of Bukharan origin.
1%
The figures extracted from selected Customs records for Tara and Tobol'sk show
that individual Bukharan visitors tended to declare between one and seven slaves
each. These were men, adolescents, children or even infants, and their purchase price
could vary between 6 and 25 roubles for an adult, and 3 to 23 roubles for a child. In
September 1648, for example, the adult slaves declared in Tara had cost 15, 18, 20
and 25 roubles in the Qalmaq encampments, and the twelve-year-olds had cost nearly
the same (15 and 23 roubles).1
The value of Muscovite slaves in the khanate was much higher. Thus in the
1670s, at a time when slaves purchased in the Qalmaq settlements and in the Baraba
steppes south-east of Tara cost between 5 and8 roubles, a single Muscovite sold for
40 to 50 roubles in the khanate, or so Pazukhin was told. And Daudov had to pay as
much as 90 roubles in order to ransom one of his fellow countrymen in Bukhara in
1676.!°7 Other evidence gives the ransom value of slaves in the khanate for the year

1589-90 when the figures ranged from 50 to 225 tanga for a male Indian slave. 108

Foodstuffs, spices, medicinal plants

1. Foodstuffs.
The fruit of the khanate was taken to countries as far apart as Siberia, India and
China, either fresh, or dried, or even as seeds. The cost of raisins in Moscow rose

sharply during the first half of the seventeenth century, prices quoted being 80 to 200
den'gi per pud in 1610, and 300 to 400 den'gi in 1652. Prices in Siberia were higher.
In Yeniseisk one pud fetched as much as 2,000 den'gi in 1649, although by 1687 it
had gone down in value to 448 den'gi.109
104 Yaterialy, 86, 380-97.
105 Vilkov, "Tobol'skie tamozhennye knigi", 18, says Siberian Tatars were also exempted.

106 Materialy, 380-5. See TsGADA, fond 214, op.1, kn. 588, list 41a, for two young slaves
bought at Yamysh in 1674 for a total of 8 roubles.

107 "Nakaz", 58, 78. Pazukhin, however, had only paid between 29 and 45 roubles for each ransomed
Slave, and in some cases the slave-owner had been satisfied with a gostinets (gift) of 5 to 9
roubles. Materialy, 284-6, 386-97. TsGADA, fond 109, op.1, 1677-8 kn.6, list 67b.

108 Fitrat, Kaziiskie dokumenty, nos. 2, 3, 4, 14, 16, 18, 20. TSGADA, fond 134, op.1, 1641
no.2, list 131. The value of the tanga as against the rouble at the time is unfortunately not

known, but if it was 12 den'gi as in 1621 and 1643 (Khilkov, 401, 405; TsGADA, fond 134,
op.1, 1646 no.2, list 131), then the price ranged between 500 and 2,700 den'gi (2.5-13.5

roubles). N.B. Ambassador Gribov makes it clear that the ‘old’ tanga was worth 12 den'gi in
1643, but in his list of disbursements he equates 57 tanga with 3 roubles, which appears to
indicate that the ‘new’ tanga was then worth 10.5 den'gi. (TsGADA, as above, list 157).
109 Sergeev, 121 and Strahlenberg, 357, mention the imports of dates and other dried fruit into

380

Merchandise

It is not known whether Muscovite honey was carried by ordinary Bukharans, but
it must have been popular in the khanate, for both ‘Abdallah II and ‘Abd al-Mu’min
asked their ambassadors to bring large quantities back in 1589, and they did so to the
tune of 819 kg and 327 kg respectively. In Moscow the price of honey varied greatly,
traders being told in 1610 to charge German buyers 40 den'gi per pud, although it
could cost anything between 120 and 640 den'gi. Not surprisingly it was far dearer in
Yeniseisk where it cost between 6 and 7 roubles (1,200-1,400 den'gi) per pud in
1649. Wine, of which ‘Abd al-Mu’min's ambassador purchased 630 pints in 1589,
may have also figured on the list of ordinary merchants, and they are known to have
dealt occasionally in butter and flour, a single merchant having sent off nearly 200 kg
from Tobol'sk to the Qalmagq in 1672.110

2. Spices and exotic plants
a. Cinnamon and pepper. No details are available about the types and quantities of

pepper imported, but far more is known about cinnamon.!!! The cinnamon taken to
Siberia was contemptuously described by Krijanich, who was living there in exile in
1661-76, as being coarse and of poor quality. However, it fetched 12 roubles per pud
in Tobol'sk in 1668, or six times as much as it did in Moscow in 1652. The Moscow
price of cinnamon fluctuated greatly during the seventeenth century. In the earlier part
of the century one pud fetched 6 roubles if the sticks were small, and as much as 24
to 80 roubles if the sticks were one arshin (71 cm) long. Later in the century the price
no longer appears to have related to size. The cost of a pud had gone down to 2

roubles by 1652, but by 1674 it was up again and it sold for 25 to 40 roubles. 112
b. Tobacco. There is no doubt that tobacco was carried by Bukharans, especially
to Siberia. However, no official records of the quantities involved have as yet come to
light, which is hardly surprising as tobacco was strongly disapproved of by the
Tsars. Its trade was either forbidden on pain of death, or else discouraged by
combining confiscation with the payment of paltry compensation. Officials were
probably not required to list the quantities confiscated, perhaps due to a supersittious
fear that they might become interested in the forbidden leaf, and they had little chance
of recording actual purchases and sales, for all transactions must have been driven
underground by Tsarist policy. The only precise information available relates to the
robbery near Turinsk of 1688 when a certain Alma Khwajah listed three packets of
undisclosed size among his losses. No value is given for this, but tobacco is known
to have been worth much more than the 12 to 14 dengi per lb which Peter the Great

Muscovy and Siberia, but give no idea of the quantities involved. Sakharov, 123. Kurts,
"Sostoyanie", 121. Kurts, "Sochinenie", 145, only gives the price of a basket of raisins. See
TsGADA, fond 214, op.1, kn. 254, list 112a, for a pud of raisins.

110 Materialy, 105. Sakharov, 128. TsSGADA, fond 214, op.1, kn. 254, list 3b. Chimitdorzhiev,
"K istorii." Ziyaev, Ekonomicheskie svyazi, 57.
111 Beschreibung, 22.
112 Titov, 136. Spasskii, Sibirskii Vestnik, XVII, kn.3, 152. Here the Latin ‘crassum’ (coarse) is
taken to equate the Russian word for red (krasnyi). Letiche, Introduction. Vilkov, Remeslo, table

29, Sakharov, 121, gives the price of cinnamon as 5 altyn (30 den'gi) for short pieces and either
20 altyn (120 den'gi) or 2 roubles (400 den’gi) for long pieces. Kurts, "Sostoyanie", 121. Kurts,
"Sochinenie", 145.

381

Bukharan trade

offered in compensation for the amounts confiscated by his Customs.!3
The tobacco which reached Siberia, generally called shar’ or ball tobacco, was
apparently cut so thin, ‘as thin as human hair’, that many refused to believe it to be
real tobacco. They were only convinced, says Krijanich, when Muscovite traders
assured them that ‘with their own eyes’ they had seen the Chinese cut tobacco leaves

in that way.!!4 Krijanich adds that it was dyed dark, light or green, dark tobacco
giving out ‘the sweetest smell’ and causing the strongest inebriation, so that “people
with a weak head were to avoid it.’ It could be macerated in sugar and, unless it was
smoked, as by the Chinese, in a copper pipe no bigger than an almond shell, it caused
people to fall, shake as if in a fit, or even die. Thus it would appear that the effects of
smoking shar' injudiciously were akin to those of smoking hard drugs, which leads
to the assumption that shar' may have been hemp.
Bukharans certainly took hemp to Iran some time during the 1670s and, according

to Tavernier, it was the ‘Uzbegs’ who had introduced the dangerous ‘tchouherssé’
into the country. He explained that ‘la fleur, ou plitost un cotton laineux qui se trouve
sur la cheneviére’, caused ‘des illusions au cerveau,-qui sont quelquefois plaisantes,
& quelquefois furieuses, & ceux qui s'en servent demeurent deux ou trois heures
comme hors du sens’. If shar' had a similar effect this would explain why the
Muscovite Church and the Tsars did their best to forbid it, or at least to control its
use. 115

3. Medicinal plants and preparations
a. Bad'yan. This was a very strong type of aniseed. Kilburger described as “quite

big, with six spikes like a star’ and said that it was strength-giving.!!6 It had not been
imported into Siberia for long when Krijanich arrived there in 1661. He noted that
most people used it there to sweeten their vodka, but ‘a curious person had
experimented with it and said it could be used as a drink for the sick’, for it cheered
them up in the same way as barley, coffee or tea.!!17 The seeds of the bad'yan could
either be made into cooking oil or used for medicinal purposes, and its wood was
suitable for turning on a lathe. The value of bad'yan appears to have remained much
the same throughout the seventeenth century, both in Siberia and in Moscow. Official
valuations set it at 8 roubles per pud in Moscow in 1672, as they did in Tobol'sk and
Tara between 1639 and 1672. However, bad'yan could fetch the higher price of 10
roubles per pud in the market, as it is known to have done in Tobol'sk in 1669-70
and in Moscow in 1674.!18 No figures are available for bad'yan imports by
individuals into Siberia, but total yearly quantities recorded for Tara and Tobol'sk
ranged from 5.50 to 116.75 puds (90.09 to 1,912.37 kg).119

113 Chimitdorzhiev, "K istorii". P.S.Z., III, 509.
114 Titov, 137. Spasskii, Sibirskii vestnik, XVII, kn.3, 153, quotes the same informant but
attributes this particular manner of cutting tobacco to the Qalmag, not to the Chinese.

115 Titov, 137. Tavernier, Les six voyages, 1676 ed., livre cinquidme, 646.
116 Kurts, "Sochinenie", 113.

117 Titov, 136-7. Spasskii, as above, 152.
118 Materialy, 451, 379. Vilkov, Remeslo, table 29. Russko-kitaiskie otnosheniya, 1, 297. Kurts,

"Sochinenie", 113, said it cost 50 den'gi in Moscow in 1674 which, if the price quoted was per
Ib, would have made it worth 10 roubles per pud.
119 Ziyaev, Ekonomicheskie svyazi, 61. Materialy, 349, 355. Vilkov, Remeslo, 177.

382

Merchandise

b. Tea. Both green and black tea were carried by Bukharans. They bought it in China
and sold it in various places, including Siberia and Moscow. In addition to its value
as a stimulant tea was thought in Muscovy ‘to strengthen man, to avert strokes and to
dispel bad breath’. Krijanich was aware of its cheering effect comparable to that of
coffee and bad'yan, but Kilburger was told in 1673-4 that it was taken either before
or after drinking (alcohol) in order ‘to avoid drunkenness’. According to Rossabi, tea
was popular in Central Asia because it kept longer than mare's milk, because it could
be used as a stimulant when the weather was cold, and also because it was a valuable
120
water-purifier.
Quantities taken to Tobol'sk by Bukharan caravans ranged from 1.50 to 32.25
pud (24 to 528 kg) in 1654 and 1671-2, and individual merchants took between 3 and
8 pud (49 to 131 kg) to Tobol'sk in 1660. Tea was also carried in several units called
sacks, ‘pieces’ and bakhcha. All of these being undefined, except for the bakhcha,
which is variously defined as equal to 45 gr, 80 gr or 3 Ib, it is difficult to estimate
whether the merchant who carried two sackfuls plus 1,000 pieces of tea was carrying
more than the average of 49 to 131 kg mentioned above.!2! According to one set of
published tables the market price of tea in Siberia ranged from 16 to 30 den'gi per lb,
but Vilkov gives the slightly higher figure of 33 den'gi per lb for Tobol'sk in 1668-9,
and a petty official from Tara said in Verkhotur'e in 1674 that he had paid 35 den'gi
per lb for a purchase of over 114 lb (7 pud). Not surprisingly, the price of tea rose by
the time it reached Moscow, where a price of 60 den'gi per lb was recorded by

Kilburger in 1673-4.122
c. Rhubarb. This was a particularly valuable commodity over which Bukharan
merchants had a virtual monopoly. They were responsible for transporting it from
China to such countries as Iran and Muscovy, from where it spread to western
Europe. The rhubarb in question was not the usual English garden variety. This
ravend cini was said by the Dutchman Nieuhoff to have a green stalk one handspan
high, a multitude of droopy and yellowish pointed leaves about two handspans long,
and sweet-smelling lilac flowers which resembled March violets. The main part of the
plant was not its stem, but its root, which was 2 to 3 handspans long, yellow with
reddish veins. It was full of sticky yellow juice which not only stained the hands, but
was very bitter, this bitterness being ‘abhorrée des plus forts naturels’.!23 The root
was covered with a dark brown bark, and could be as wide as ‘la cuisse d'un homme
robuste’.
The root of the ravend cini, which a modern writer calls ‘rhubarbus palmatum,

Chinese or Turkish rhubarb’,!24 was prepared for export by a lengthy process.
According to Nieuhoff it was cut up into pieces, spread on stone tables above a fire
for 5 to 6 days to stop the juices from running, then strung up to dry. Du Halde gives
a similar description of the procedure but has a different view as to the importance of
120 Titov, 78, 137. Kurts, "Sochinenie", 113. Rossabi, 79.

121 yaterialy, 348-9, 355. Ziyaev, Ekonomicheskie svyazi, 50, 60, 34, 36. TSGADA, fond 214,
op.1, kn. 588, list 36b. Chimitdorzhiev, "K istorii". For the size of a bakhcha see Khachikian,

274; Ogloblin, "Bytovye cherty", 11; and Baddeley, II, 113.

122 yaterialy, 379. Vilkov, Remeslo, table 29. TsGADA, fond 214, op.1, kn. 588, 124b; but see
ibid., 38b for a Customs valuation of tea at 40 den'gi per lb, also in Tyumen’ in 1674. Kurts,
"Sochinenie", 113.
123 i.e., hateful to the strongest constitution. Nieuhoff, 70-71.

124 Johns, 253.

383

Bukharan trade

the sun in the drying process. Whereas Nieuhoff and De Guignes say the pieces were
hung up in a windy place out of the sun to prevent them from losing their strength,
Du Halde insists that they were hung up in the fiercest heat of the sun to prevent them
from rotting.!25 Another description of the drying process is provided by Bell who
wrote that the Mongols hung the rhubarb pieces up to dry either on their tents or on
the horns of their sheep! Whichever method was used, drying took some 2 months to

complete, after which the rhubarb was put into barrels ready for export.16

Different qualities of rhubarb were carried by Bukharans. the darker one, which
Muscovites called kopytchatyi, being more valuable than the cherenkovyi or
rapontik, a paler species far too prone to rotting which Leslie Johns calls common
rhubarb,!27 and which was sometimes fraudulently passed off as ravend cini,
although it did not possess its special virtues. According to Du Halde and Nieuhoff
rhubarb had a variety of medicinal uses. They noted that it was equally effective as a
purge or as a cure for a loose stomach, and that it was used for treating jaundice and a
variety of skin complaints. In Siberia it was considered the panacea for all evils and
was said to stimulate the appetite, to strengthenthe bodily functions, to cure
indigestion and, through its leaves, to control scurvy. Other uses for the versatile
root, the best specimens of which came from the Kansu and Szechwang provinces of
China, were as incense for cult purposes, as a tanning agent and as a dye for woollen

128
materials.
Quantities carried by Bukharans varied greatly, but they could be very large. As
much as 30 pud (491 kg) of kopytchatyi rhubarb was delivered to Tomsk in 1654 by
a single merchant. And in the twenty years between 1637 and 1658 total yearly
imports to Tobol'sk and Tara ranged from 18 to 116 pud (294.8-1,900 kg) for
Tobol'sk, and 8 to 826.5 pud (131-13,538 kg) for Tara.129
Rhubarb, which was officially assessed at 10 to 18 roubles a pud in Tobol'sk and

Tara between 1639 and 1672, fetched much higher prices in Moscow, at least from
1652. According to De Rodes it then fetched 45 roubles per pud, having greatly
increased in price since the early part of the century when it cost 2 roubles 80 if ‘as
thick as a horse's hoof’ and 12 roubles if ‘expensive’.!3° The new price was quite
reasonable, however, in comparison with the one guinea (£1.05) per English lb
(453.5 grammes) paid in early eighteenth-century Scotland which works out at
something between 3.96 and 4.04 roubles per Russian lb, or 158 to 161 roubles per
pud.13!
125 Nieuhoff, 71. Du Halde, III, 492. De Guignes, Voyages, II, 258-9.

126 Bell, Pekin, 107-8.
127 Johns, 253, says that in the eighteenth century rapontik was crossed with the rhubarbus
palmatum and that the stem of the resulting hybrid was used for cooking in Britain and Europe.
128 Kurts, "Sochinenie", 106. Vneshnyaya politika, IV, 628. Du Halde and Nieuhoff, as above.
Mikhaleva, Torgovye i posol'skie svyazi, 11. Ziyaev, Ekonomicheskie svyazi, 42-43. Yule, I,
CCXVI. Kopylov, Kul'tura, 45-46. Titov, 78. The medicinal advantages of the rhubarb root,
and the care taken by Muscovite officials in handling it, are studied in greater depth in a work in
preparation.

129 Ziyaev, Ekonomicheskie svyazi, 69. Materialy, 346-7, 354-7.
130 oe Ekonomicheskie svyazi, 69. Materialy, 379. Kurts, "Sostoyanie",

122. Sakharov,

131 Bell, Pekin, 108n. According to a letter from the Gosudarstvennyi Bank SSSR dated 10
December 1970, ‘during the period 1730-40 the value of the Russian currency - 2 Roubles was
equality (sic) 1 Ducat’. And Mc Cusker, 11-13, equates 1 Ducat of any type
to ei

£0.48 in that period.

DORs Oe ae ae

384

Merchandise

d. Musk. This strongly perfumed substance found in quantities of up to 8 grammes in
a gland of the male musk deer came from Tibet and was very valuable. It had several
medicinal applications, in addition to its obvious use for making perfumes and some
sort of ‘air freshener’. According to Du Halde, musk could ‘expell three sorts of
insects which breed in the stomach of some sick persons, prevent troublesome
dreams, deliver from the disorders of the stomach (and) remove blemishes from the

face’. It was also used to bring on childbirth and was particularly sought after by
peasants, as its strong smell protected them from snakes.
Du Halde explained that musk was a sort of salt which was first (taken out of the
gland and) dried, after which it was sealed in the tightly sewn up gland in order to
retain the highly volatile perfume. Because it was sold in this form, it was easily
counterfeited.

Strahlenberg wrote

that Siberian musk, or cabardin,

was often

substituted for the yellow Tibetan (Tonquin) musk, which had a far more potent smell
and was somewhat larger. This was done by dyeing the whitish-grey Siberian
variety, then mixing in a small quantity of Tibetan musk, in the ratio of 1 to 10. The
result was a product that sold in Moscow at 20-25 roubles per English lb in the early
eighteenth century,!32 at a time when Siberian musk was worth no more than 5 to 6
roubles. Sometimes lead was fraudulently added to the musk, and Kilburger says that
some counterfeiters filled a bladder with leather, lead and blood, and passed it off as

musk. 133
In the seventeenth century musk appears to have cost between four and five times
as much as cabardin in Siberia, and this was still the case when Strahlenberg visited
the area in the first quarter of the eighteenth century. Musk was valued between 7 and
10 roubles per lb in Tara and Tobol'sk between 1639 and 1672. And as for cabardin,

both its official price and its price on the market place were given as 2 roubles per lb
in 1674.134 Prices were much higher in Moscow, where musk was said to be worth

22 roubles per lb in 1672. Bukharans are known to have dealt in both but do not
appear to have indulged in any fraudulent practices, for even their bitterest critic,
Krijanich, levels no accusation against them on this score.!35
e. Struy bobrovyi or castor (castoreum). This was a Muscovite preparation made
from a yellow and strongly perfumed oily substance found in two pairs of ‘dried
membranous follicles of the Beaver ... situated between the anus and the genital
organs of both sexes’ which were removed at the death of the animal and dried either
by smoke or in the sun.!36 Like musk it was valued for its medicinal qualities and

132 Strahlenberg wrote some time after 1726.
133 Dy Halde, II, 154; III, 487. Strahlenberg, 339. Tavernier, Les six voyages, II, 316. Kurts,
"Sochinenie", 105. Parry, 74-80. The adulteration of musk with dried blood and other matters

was still very common and very difficult to detect in the early part of this century.

134 Strahlenberg, 339. Materialy, 379. See Ziyaev, Ekonomicheskie svyazi, 55, and TSGADA,
fond 214, op.1, kn. 588, listy 110b, 42a, for the price and valuation of cabardin in 1674 in
Tobol'sk and Tyumen’. Surprisingly enough, however, in the same year a Tobol’'sk Bukharan
brought back from Yamysh 181.5 Ib (11 batman of 16.5 Ib each) of musk which he allegedly
purchased for only 165 roubles, i.e. less than 1 rouble per Ib, and this price was not queried by

the Tobol'sk Customs officials.

135 Materialy, 349. Russko-kitaiskie otnosheniya, I, 297. TSGADA, fond 214, op.1, kn. 588,
listy 42a-b, 110b. Titov, 78-79, 131-40.

136 Parry, 71. Strahlenberg, 316, said the two bladders of the animal are ‘covered with a thin skin in
which is contained a Substance like Wax, yellow, soft, and of a strong Smell.’ Materialy, 459.

385

Bukharan trade

was sometimes mixed with it by counterfeiters for this purpose, because it was far
cheaper. However, castoreum was mainly used for dyeing materials. One 1b cost
between 1 and 1.5 roubles in seventeenth century Siberia, and 1.5 to 3 roubles in

Moscow. Bukharans took some back from both Muscovy and Siberia. One merchant
declared 5 lb on leaving Astrakhan in 1681, others bought between 40 and 60 Ib in
Tobol'sk in 1674 at a price of 1 rouble per 1b.137
f. Temzuy/tansy. Bukharans are also likely to have carried this Chinese medicinal
root, 1.5 lb of which was registered in Tobol'sk in 1655-6 as originating in Central
Asia.!38 The root of the tansy was said by the herbalist John Gerard in 1597 to be
especially useful against gout, but its leaves were also used as a wormer, a pain killer,
a help to the digestion and also to relieve varicose veins.!39 Other medicinal herbs
taken to Siberia included the mamrum (lat. marum) of which one merchant carried 40

lb to Tyumen’ in 1674.140

VI
1. Precious

Precious metals and stones, walrus tusks

metals and gems.

A certain amount of gold and silver was transported in the form of bars, coins or
jewellery, together with precious stones, amber, white and red coral, and objects
made of amber and red coral. The behaviour of Bukharans with regard to gems was
regarded with suspicion in Siberia. Krijanich accused them of failing to declare them
at the Customs and of defrauding inexperienced purchasers by fobbing them off with
coloured glass.!4! Whether or not this was the case Bukharans carried a variety of
precious stones from China and Kashghariya, and probably traded in Badakhshani
lapis lazuli and spinels when these items were available on the open market.
As for quantities, from the figures available it seems that individual merchants
were likely to carry earrings, necklaces, bullion and between 12 and 300 coral beads,
quite apart from their consignments of hides, furs and tea. Thus Alma Khwajah listed
8 ‘lans’ of gold, 8 large necklaces and 25 coral beads among the goods which were

stolen from him near Turinsk in 1688,!42 and all these items sold very well in
137 Parry 72. TSGADA, fond 214, op.1, kn. 254, list 32a. Kurts, "Sostoyanie", 122. It cost 3
roubles per lb. in Moscow in 1652, but Kilburger gave a lower price of between 1.5 and 2.25
roubles for 1673-4 (Kurts, "Sochinenie", 285, 105). Materialy, 366-7. TSGADA,

fond 214,

op.1, kn. 588, list 110b. Ziyaev, Ekonomicheskie svyazi, 55. Strahlenberg, 316, quoted prices
of 1.5 to 4 roubles for early eighteenth century Moscow.
138 aterialy, 459, 346-7.

139 The Hamlyn guide, 196. Grieves, 790.

140 TsGADA, fond 214, op.1, kn. 588, list 37a.

141 Beschreibung, 22. Van Klenk, 441. Titov, 78-79, 138.
142 Ziyaev, Ekonomicheskie svyazi, 55. Chimitdorzhiev, "K istorii". Russko-kitaiskie otnosheniya, 293, 318. The lan was said to weigh as much as 26 altyn 4 den'gi, i.e. 4/5 of 1 rouble in
1672, and if this was still the case in 1688 when the rouble weighed between 39 and 41

grammes (Melnikova, 228-9), then each lan in question weighed between 31.2 and 32.8
grammes, and Alma Khwajah was therefore carrying between 249.6 and 262.4 grammes of gold.
According to Lange, 228, in the early eighteenth century the lan weighed a little over 1/16 of a
Dutch Ib, and this would make it about 30.9 grammes, if the Ib in question was the Amsterdam

Ib for which Moreland (333) gives a weight of 494 grammes.

386

Merchandise

Siberia. In 1649 coral beads cost between 12 and 30 roubles per lb. in Yeniseisk,
according to their size. Gold and silver were quoted there at 10 roubles ‘per litre’ (i.e.
307.12 gr) in 1687. And the price of pearls was particularly high, fetching 144 to 288
roubles per lb in 1649, and between 96 and 153 roubles per lb in 1687. 1%
2. Walrus

tusks

Walrus tusks, the Russian zub rybyi, were much sought after by Bukharans, for they
could be used for making abacuses and beads, as well as knife and dagger handles
which were usually chased with gold and precious stones. The walrus tusks could
also be ground into powder and taken as an antidote for poison, as was the case in
Muscovy. There were two types of walrus tusks, the plain ones being less valuable
than the mottled or marbled variety. According to Kostomarov the value of the tusks
increased with their size. Giles Fletcher, who was in Moscow in 1596-7, wrote that

large tusks could be ‘almost two foote of length’ and weigh ‘11 or 12 lb apiece’.
Kilburger, who visited Moscow nearly 80 years later, wrote that walrus tusks were
more prized there than elephants’ tusks. Kostomarov gives their average price in 1650
as 1 rouble per lb, but Paul of Aleppo who was in Moscow in that year wrote that a
pud (40 lb) could cost between 10 and 50 roubles, an enormous variation in price

which must have reflected differences in both quality and size.!44 As for the scale of
the Bukharan trade one merchant is known to have carried 12 walrus tusks in 1688,
other individuals purchased 40, 80 or 150 1b (16.38, 32.76, 61,4 kg) in Astrakhan

!45
and Tobol'sk in the late seventeenth century.

VII

Dyes and household goods

1. Dyes.
Several types of dye were carried, from Indian indigo to Muscovite madder, including
European cochineal, vermilion, and all the plants and unguents which might be used
as dyes. Salbancke and Tavernier give very different accounts of the processing of the
indigo plant, which may of course have changed considerably in the half-century that
separated their visits to India. Salbancke, who was there in 1609, said that the cut
stems were left to rot in a heap for 6 months, after which they-were trampled by oxen,
then ground fine, boiled and sorted. Tavernier, who was there in 1665, explained that

the hemp-like stems were first soaked in lime and water and squeezed every day to
soften them. Then, when they had turned into a sort of mud, they were wrung out
and made into tiny, egg-size mud cakes which were left to dry.
At this stage dishonest producers were likely to try and increase the weight of the
valuable dye. They would place the wet cakes on sand, or else dry them in a damp

143 TsGADA, fond 214, op.1, kn. 254, listy 12a, 95b, 84a, 131a. The price of pearls was actually

given in zolotnik, i.e. in quantities of 4.26 gr, which cost between 1.5 and 3 roubles in 1649.
Kostomarov, 165, explains that the litre which was used as a measure for spun silk, silver and
gold, equalled 72 zolotniki, ic. 72/96 of a Russian lb weighing 409.5 grammes.

144 Titov, 78-79. Fletcher G., 13. Kurts, "Sochinenie", 112, 307-8, 266. Kostomarov, 255-6. Paul,

14. TsGADA, fond 214, op.1, kn. 254, list 78. In Yeniseisk in 1687 the price range was as
follows: small tusks 6 roubles, medium tusks 12 roubles, large tusks 20 roubles.
145 Chimitdorzhiev, "K istorii". Materialy, 366-7. Ziyaev, Ekonomicheskie svyazi, 56.

387

Bukharan trade

atmosphere so that they retained the maximum water. Counterfeiters were severely
punished in India, if caught, but no doubt Bukharans and their customers learnt to

detect any such fraud. They must have felt confident on that score, for individual
merchants were prepared to take between 98 and 213 kg of indigo all the way to
Kazan' in 1616 and 1619. It is not known how much they sold it for, but even if the
sale price in Kazan' was far lower than the 85 den'gi per lb which indigo fetched in
Moscow in 1652, a sufficient profit must have been made to cover the expense of
their long journey.
Bukharans also purchased madder from the Muscovite town of Terki on a regular
basis, and although the size of their purchases is not known, they were important
enough for the Tsar to decide in 1650 that he would take this trade into his own

hands. 146
As for cochineal, Bukharans were able to buy it in Siberia where it cost 180
den'gi per lb in Tyumen’ in 1674.147
2. Household

goods

a. Cooking-pots. Iron cooking-pots from the khanate, called kotly chyudinnye in
Siberia, sold there at 2 to 4 roubles apiece. Yearly totals of 3 to 71 were registered in
the Customs books of Tara and Tobol'sk, and in 1688 a merchant who claimed that
he had been robbed near Turinsk said that he had been carrying two such cookingpots. Bukharans also carried brass, sometimes made up into cooking-pots, which
they bought in Siberia by weight, generally in quantities of 1 to 1.5 pud (16.38-24.57

kg). 148

b. Wooden dishes from Muscovy were also acquired by Bukharans for resale, but
one has to speculate as to the quantities involved, as the only evidence uncovered so
far refers to the purchase of 50 dishes by a Bukharan in Tara in 1654.
c. Tseninnye. This was a general Muscovite term applied indiscriminately to glazed
earthenware, porcelain and even celadon ware from China which Bukharans
transported to the khanate, to Muscovy and to Siberia. The tseninnye were bought in
China, at Yamysh fair, or in the various Siberian towns. Little is known about the
scale of this trade, except that one Bukharan who arrived in Tyumen' in September
1674 brought over 20 cups and 20 dishes valued by Customs at 50 den'gi a dish and
30 den'gi a cup, and that in the same year two other Bukharans purchased in
Tobol'sk 50 medium and small cups which cost a total of 6 roubles, or an average of
24 den'gi each. The price of cups in Moscow is not known, but the nine which were
presented to Tsar Aleksei by ambassador Hajji Farrukh were assessed at 31 den'gi

each. 149
146 Tavernier, Observations,

121-3. Salbancke, 84. Pamyatniki, XXII, 276, 640-1, 643. Kurts,

"Sostoyanie", 122. A./., 1V, 141. See further about madder in chapter 14.

147 TsGADA, fond 214, op.1, kn. 588, listy 444b, 445b.

148 Vilkov, Remeslo, table 21, table 29. Materialy, 461, 379, 346-7, 354-5. Ziyaev, Ekonomicheskie svyazi, 59, 60, 65. Chimitdorzhiev, "K istorii". TSGADA, fond 214, op.1, kn.
254, list 107b. The price of brass was 14 roubles per pud in Yeniseisk prior to 1687 when it
went down to 6 roubles.

149 TsGADA, fond 214, op.1, kn. 588, listy 37, 38b, 110b. Ziyaev, Ekonomicheskie svyazi, 65.
Another Bukharan is said to have taken back 50 krafchatye (?) dishes from Tara in 1654.

388

Merchandise

d. Mirrors, brass light fittings and clocks. Mirrors were bought in Muscovy for
resale either in Siberia or in the khanate where all sizes were much in demand. From
the very few entries relating to individual merchants travelling in Siberia in the late
seventeenth century, it seems that the usual number carried was 3, although a certain
‘Almemetov’ took as many as six Yaroslavl' mirrors to Tobol'sk in 1674.15 Brass
light fittings from the khanate, mica , pieces of glass, clocks and clock mechanisms
from Muscovy and Western Europe were also sold by Bukharans.!5!
e. Carpets, blankets, rugs. Among the carpets there were long and narrow carpet
runners, as well as goats' hair gilim, of which the largest yearly total delivered in
Tobol'sk was 63 in 1639-40. There were also Chinese carpets which were used as
hangings in the houses of Bukharan residents of Tobol'sk. Other items carried
included cotton blankets and quilts, felt pieces and felt travelling rugs for use on
sledges taken to Siberia. According to the price lists and Customs assessments
available for Tara and Tobol'sk in the seventeenth century it seems that Bukharan
gilims and carpet runners fetched about 2 roubles apiece, although the records vary
between one and three roubles. Flowered travelling rugs made of felt and of unknown
origin were similarly assessed at 2 roubles and cotton blankets were expected to fetch

1.5 to 2 roubles.
!52
f. Oddments such as wax, glue, the much-prized paper of Samarqand, pillows, tents,
knives, boxes and abacuses were also likely to be found on a Bukharan's camels and
pack-horses, eight abacuses and two nomads' tents being included in the varied

assortment of goods which were carried by Babinak and Adam Quli in 1688.53

VIII

Haberdashery

Horn combs, needles, tin buttons, scissors and copper earrings were regularly
carried, in quantities ranging from 15 to 20 combs, 100 to 500 needles, 30 to 100
earrings, and no less than 500 buttons. Thus in 1688 the enterprising Babinak and
Adam Quli who were robbed near Turinsk had been carrying a total of 60 combs and
2,000 needles, plus 60 tassels. 154

TsGADA,

fond

109, op.1,

1669-75,

kn.1, list 82b. Yuldashev,

K istorii torgovykh

posol'skikh svyazei, 42.
150 Chimitdorzhiev, "K istorii". Ziyaev, Ekonomicheskie svyazi, 56. See also "Nakaz", 76-77, and

Materialy, 221 for mirrors as a popular item in the khanate in 1669-71 and 1674.
131 Ziyaev, Ekonomicheskie svyazi, 55, 70. One Bukharan carried 30 pieces of round glass,
together with great quantities of haberdashery in 1662. Van Klenk, 441.
152 materialy, 344-5, 352-3, 378. Beschreibung, 20. Vilkov, Remeslo, table 21, table 29. Carpets
are also mentioned by Ziyaev (Ekonomicheskie svyazi, 60) and Van Klenk (441).
153 Ziyaev, Ekonomicheskie svyazi, 54, 71. Chimitdorzhiev, "K istorii".
154 TsGADA, fond 214, op.1, kn.254, listy 14b, 78a. The price of large horn combs in Yeniseisk

had gone down from 4 roubles (800 den'gi) per 100 in 1649 to 20 altyn (120 den'gi) in 1687, i.e.
from 8 den'gi to 1.2 den'gi each. Ziyaev, Ekonomicheskie svyazi, 55, 65. Van Klenk, 441.
Chimitdorzhiev, "K istorii".

389

Bukharan trade

Military and agricultural

Items in this category included

the famous

Bukharan

bows,

as well as

gunpowder, saltpetre, metal bars, sword blades, axes, sickles, drums and drumskins.

However, only the Bukharan bows appear in the Tobol'sk and Tara Customs tables,
where their value is shown as between 225 and 400 den'gi, although according to
Vilkov a higher price of 400-600 den'gi was paid for them in Tobol'sk in 1639-

40.155 According to the Customs records available it seems that very few bows
reached Tara and Tobol'sk during the seventeenth century, total yearly deliveries
ranging from 2 to 61. More were probably taken to Muscovy, for a single Bukharan

is known to have carried as many as 30 bows to Kazan' in 1616.156
Axes were bought in fives and tens in Siberia, and Bukharans carried drumskins
in numbers ranging from 150 to 500. They were also suspected of trading in
muskets, sabres and gunpowder in Siberia and Muscovy, although little concrete
evidence of their involvement in this trade has been found so far. This is hardly
surprising, because the export of weapons was generally forbidden and Bukharans
were unlikely to have declared the purchase of such goods, even if they did deal in
them legally.
:
The only entry which has been. found in the Siberian records reveals that in 1674
two merchants took to Tobol'sk a total of 2.5 puds (40 kg.55) of gunpowder plus 3
muskets and 7 sabres which they had purchased in Muscovy, but it is of course
impossible to say whether this was an isolated occasion and, if not, whether the

quantities were in any way typical.157

155 Ziyaev, Ekonomicheskie

svyazi, 70. Chimitdorzhiev, "K istorii". Materialy, 379. Vilkov,

Remeslo, table 29.

156 Materialy, 346-7, 354-5, 363. Vilkov, Table 21. Pamyatniki, XXII, 278.
157 Ziyaev, Ekonomicheskie svyazi, 65, 70, 56. Chimitdorzhiev, "K istorii". Sadly the value
of
these items in Tobol'sk is not recorded. Prices are only available for Yeniseisk where
in 1649

gunpowder fetched 16 roubles per pud, Moscow sabres sold for 2 roubles and
muskets cost
between 6 and 8 roubles.
By 1687 prices, had
gonekn.down
example
Pp , Cost between
124b.
7b, 26a,, for
listymuskets,
254, and
op.1,
2.5 and 3.5 roubles. TsGADA, fond 214,

390

Maps of trade routes

a. Iran, Kashghariya and India
b. China
c. Muscovy and Siberia

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to Kazan’ via the Irgiz
to Astrakhan via Gur'ev
to Astrakhan via Saraichik
from Saraichik to Samara
to Tobol'sk via Balkh & Aksu
to Tobol'sk via Suzak and Lake Yamysh
to Tobol'sk via Turkestan & the ishim

400 km

11
Routes

The itineraries adopted by Bukharan traders and ambassadors involved them in long
and difficult journeys through steppes, deserts and mountains. Water and food could
be scarce, armed robbers were a constant danger, but the merchants were as resilient
as they were determined. Even during major upheavals such as the Qalmaq-Qazaq
war of 1555-8, the Time of Troubles of 1584-1613 and Stenka Razin's insurrection
of 1667-71, they did their best to ply their trade, taking with them not only food and
stoves for the journey, but also spades for digging wells, and weapons for selfdefence.

I Routes

to Khwarazm

There were two routes to the towns of Khiva and Urganj which were generally visited
on the way to Muscovy or to the Noghays. The first stage on both routes was
Hairabad, a village on the Bukharan side of the frontier, 15 versts (9.9 miles or 15.9

km) north-west of the capital. This part of the journey took one day on horseback and
twice as long with a caravan. After Hairabad the routes parted to cross the Qizil Qum
desert in different directions towards Hazarasp and Khanqa. The first continued to the
north-west, reaching Hazarasp in 3 days and Khanga a day later. This route was
shorter, but seems to have had only one well on the way. The second route turned
south-west along the Zerafshan river towards Qarakul and the Amu-Darya, then north
up the Amu-Darya, stopping at Khanga, which was 3 versts (about 2 miles) from the
river. The advantage of this route was that river water was available most of the way,
but it was longer, and ambassador Khokhlov complained in 1623 that it was ‘all sand
with no habitation and with very poor places’. It took him 12 days to cover this part
of the journey, but since his large and cumbersome party of officials, traders and
released slaves cannot have travelled faster than a caravan, it seems safe to assume
that this distance could have been covered in half the time by a man on horseback.!
From Khanga it was one day to Khiva, so that the whole journey from Bukhara to
Khiva could take as little as 6 days, although 8 days was more usual for a man on
horseback, as the Muscovite authorities were told by the Khwarazmian ambassadors
Shaikh Baba and Abreim Azizov (Ibrahim ‘Aziz), who respectively travelled to

Moscow in 1646 and 1691.2 However, the same journey took Gribov nearly 20 days
in 1643.3
From Khiva two more days were needed for travellers to reach Urganj (Urgench)
1 Dzhamolov, 279-80. Khilkov, 396-7.
2 Materialy, 317. TsGADA,

fond 134, op.1, 1689-91 no.3, list 131b.

3 TsGADA, fond 134, op.1, 1641 no.2, listy 148-9.

Bukharan trade

by the direct route, or 4-5 days if they went through Kat which was situated on the
Amu-Darya.4 Thus the 50 farsangs/leagues from Bukhara to Urganj could be covered
in as little as 8 to 13 days, although in 1559 Richard Johnson was assured by ‘a
Tartarian subject to the Prince of Boghar’ and ‘another Tartarian merchant dwelling in
the citie of Boghar’, that the journey took 15 days. No details were given about the
journey but it seems likely that he followed the route via Qarakul and Kat for,
although there was no ‘habitation of houses’ and travellers had to ‘lodge in their owne
tents, cariyng [sic] with them to eate their severall provisions’, he noted that they
would not be short of water, as ‘there bee many wels of faire water at equall baiting

places not farre distant dayly to be had’.*

II Routes to Muscovy
1. The sea route.

This route went through Khiva and Urganj, then across the Ust Urt and Turkmen
territory to the Caspian. Transit or Customs dues were paid to the Khwarazmian
authorities and to the Turkmen on the way. There were several landing-stages to
choose from on the north-eastern shores of the Caspian, but the two most commonly
used during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were Kabakly and Karagan. The
exact position of these landing-stages is not fully established, although it seems clear
that Kabakly was on the Buzachi peninsula, and that Karagan, further from Qalmaqheld territory and therefore safer from attack, was situated on the southern peninsula

of Mangishlaq.®
The journey from Urganj to these harbours, according to one of Johnson's
informants, took 10 days ‘by lande specially with Camels bearing the weight of 15
poodes’(245.70 kg). But Amin Bahadur gave a much longer estimate of time in
1643. Complaining to the Tsar about the difficulties which Khwarazmian merchants
had to overcome in order to trade with Muscovy, he said it took them 30-35 days to
get to the Caspian. This ties up with the information collected by the Muscovite
authorities in 1675, which was that, ‘if travelling quick’ one could cover the distance
between Bukhara and Karagan in 6 weeks. However, it seems that the stretch
between Urganj and the sea could be covered in just over 3 weeks, provided that
merchants and ambassadors were not attacked en route, for despite numerous
difficulties and a two-day enforced stop on the way Gribov managed to complete the

journey in 24 days in 1643.7
4 This Urganj is the one now known as Kunya Urganj or Old Urganj, and was once on the shores of
the Amu-Darya. For the Amu-Darya's change of direction in the sixteenth century and its
repercussions, see Abu *1-Ghazi, tr. 312, text 291; Bartol'd, Sochineniya, III, 23-94; Burton,

Bukharans in trade, 332. There may have also been a direct route from Bukhara to Urganj which
was shorter. Russko-indiiskie otnosheniya, 191.
5 Dzhamolov, 279-80. Abd al-Kerim, Histoire, 172. Materialy, 317. Shaikh Baba said this journey

took 10 days on horseback. Johnson, 480, had himself travelled via Kat.
6 Fekhner, 29-30, mentions 4 harbours, including Karagan on the Mangishlaq peninsula.
Chuloshnikov (Materialy, 73-76) places Kabakly on the southern shores of the Buzachi
peninsula. Yuldashev (K istorii torgovykh i posol'skikh svyazei, 61) and Dzhamolov (280-1)
place it on its northern shores, in the Mertvyi Kutluk bay.
7 Johnson, 480. Materialy, 177. Russko-indiiskie otnosheniya, 191. TsGADA, fond 134, op.1,

1641 no.2, listy 102-6.

392

Trade routes

The journey across the Caspian was generally undertaken in the spring and
autumn,

because the sea froze in winter, and both the travellers and the sailors

preferred to avoid the great heat of summer.’ Travellers sailed to Astrakhan in a busa,
a round-bottomed boat with one sail which was made in Muscovy. This was a large
boat, so heavy and difficult to turn that it easily came to grief in the storms of the
Caspian. In 1668 it was suggested in Moscow that the busa be replaced by a stronger
type of boat, the katarga, which, apart from withstanding the storms, would be safer,
quicker and more versatile, as it could be used on the Volga as well as on the
Caspian. However, the Muscovite authorities took no action and the busa continued
to ply across the Caspian, as shown by the fact that Daudov used it in 1677 and

Azizov did so in 1691.9
No indication has been found of the exact size of a busa, but in 1579 Christopher
Burroughs is known to have bought a ‘Busse’ on behalf of the Muscovy Company,
which could carry a cargo of 35 tons. This would not have met with Arthur
Edwards's approval, for he wrote in 1564 that the locally built ‘barke or craer...of
the burthen of 30 tunnes at the most’ was ‘very little’ and suggested instead that ‘one
60 tunnes or more and drawing but sixe foote of water when it is laden’ be
constructed, as being far more suitable ‘to passe the Caspian sea’ .10
Several dangers had to be faced by travellers on the Caspian. In addition to natural
hazards such as strong winds, sudden storms, sandbanks, shoals and the general
shallowness of the sea, which could be as little as 5 ft, there were also human dangers

caused by a variety of ‘predators’, of whom the Cossacks were probably the most
threatening. In order to deal with this problem and ensure the safety of passengers
and crews the busa was always provided with a large number of armed men. Thus in
1639 there were as many as 54 soldiers on the busa which had been built, at a cost of
over 206 roubles, for the use of Iranian merchants.
The captain of the busa was an important official whose duties included checking
all the merchandise taken on board, and sealing all the containers and bales until

Customs dues were taken on arrival in Muscovy. He also had to make sure that
trading operations were conducted peaceably during his four weeks' stay at Kabakly
or Karagan. The fee paid by merchants was generally based on the weight of the
goods carried, but if the goods were of little value they were expected to pay
separately for their passage. The tariff applicable was decided by the Muscovite
authorities. However, ambassadors complained that the crew and captain of the busa
took advantage of Bukharan and Khwarazmian merchants, refusing them permission
to travel on the busa, or else forcing them to pay extortionate dues before allowing

them on board.!!
Once aboard travellers got across in 8 to 27 days, but a few more days went by
before they could disembark at Astrakhan, for they had to transfer to shallow rowing

8 Although Daudov crossed from Astrakhan in early September, he probably did so because he knew
that his journey from Moscow had taken rather long (6 months) to organise and he was afraid of
arousing the Tsar's displeasure if he remained too long in Astrakhan.
9 Yuldashev, K istorii torgovykh i posol'skikh svyazei, 62. Fekhner, 22-23. Baklanova,
"Privoznye tovary", 33. D.A.I., V, 404-5. TsGADA,

fond 109, op.1, 1671-6 kn.4, list 329a;

fond 134, op.1, 1689-91 kn. 3, listy 123a, 124a.

10 Hakluyt, III, 230, 45.
11 Yyldashev, K istorii torgovykh i posol'skikh svyazei, 62. Russko-indiiskie otnosheniya, 41-42.
Materialy,

177, 101.

393

Bukharan trade

boats in order to negotiate the last 12 to 13 leagues up the Volga.!2 These pauzki
(contemporary English travellers called them pavoses) which le pére Avril describes
as a sort of gondola, were quick enough, but then there was a lengthy Customs
examination in Astrakhan, where officials came aboard to assess and tax the

merchants’ goods.!3
From Astrakhan merchants and ambassadors could complete the journey of about
1,650 miles (2,640 km) to Moscow either overland or up the Volga, the Volga route
being practical for only part of the year, as the river was often too shallow in the
summer, and was always frozen in winter. In mild years it was only navigable from
late March until September, but no longer. An English party who were still on the
Volga in early October 1568 managed to get as far as Yaroslavl’, north of Moscow,
but then a sudden hard frost brought them to a halt and the ice eventually broke up

their boats!!4
On setting off from Astrakhan overland or by river, it was preferable to travel in a
large group and with an armed escort. The river journey was undertaken in a convoy
of as many as 500 flat-bottomed boats of different types. The strug, for example, 5 to
20 metres long, which was propelled by oarsmen and a sail, seems to have taken 15
‘or more passengers and 800 to 1,000 tons in freight, but the nasad, which was
similarly propelled and 35 to 40 metres long, only carried freight.!5 An armed escort
led the convoy in a separate boat. The journey was slow and difficult, taking between
6 and 17 weeks upstream. The strug proceeded along the Volga past Tsarityn,
Samara, Kazan' and Nizhnii Novgorod, up the Oka past Murom, Kasimov and
Kolomna, and along the Moskva river to Moscow,. but some travellers preferred to
leave the boat at Kolomna and go overland for the last lap of the journey. The journey
downstream from Moscow was generally shorter, taking between 5 and 7.5 weeks.!®
Many factors contributed to the slowness of the journey. There were shoals and
sandbanks on the river, severe gales could force the convoy to remain at anchor, or
else the wind might drop completely, which meant that the boat would have to be
pulled along by a painfully slow system. The crew had to haul on a cable attached to
an anchor thrown ahead of the boat. Often the vagaries of navigation separated the
travellers from their escorts, and then they were totally at the mercy of armed
attackers. Travellers were in special danger when the boats were at a standstill, for
Noghay and Cossack gangs were not only interested in their possessions; the entire
party might be killed or else taken prisoner and sold off as slaves. Le pére Avril and
his party were so afraid of the hordes of Tatars who infested the banks of the Volga in
the autumn that when they were stuck in the ice, they hid in thickets and did not dare

12 Russko-indiiskie otnosheniya, 191. In 1675 merchants said it took roughly three weeks to travel
from Astrakhan to Karagan. Burnes, II, 425, was therefore rather optimistic when he wrote that

the whole journey from Astrakhan to ‘Mungushluck, Orgunje and Bokhara’ took 30 days.

13 Avril, 74-75. Fekhner, 21-22. Yuldashev, K istorii torgovykh i posot'skikh svyazei, 62.
14 Yuldashev, K istorii torgovykh i posol'skikh svyazei, 93. Hakluyt, III, 245, 156.
15 Fekhner, 21. Geraklitov, 103. Klyuchevskii, Skazaniya, 265. TsGADA, fond 109, op.1, 1669-75
kn.6, listy 24a-b. In 1677 two strug rowed by 50 men were provided for ‘Ali Murad and his suite
of 30. Ibid., 1671-6, kn.4, list 289a.

16 Hakluyt, III, 34, 18. Fekhner, 21, 38, 29. See Yuldashev, K istorii torgovykh i posol'skikh
svyazei, 93-94, and Purchas, 1407, for upstream journeys of ten weeks. Milton, 11, said the
downstream journey took 46 ‘daies and nights mostly by water’. Materialy, 98, 405. See

TsGADA, fond 109, op.1, 1671-6 kn.4, listy 288b-9a, for some of the towns visited by Daudov
and his party in 1675.

394

Trade routes

to make a fire in case they were spotted.!7
When merchants travelled overland from Astrakhan they generally did so with a
sizeable caravan, or in the company of an ambassador's retinue, for they knew that an
armed escort was invariably provided and the camps would be guarded at night.
Individual merchants felt particularly safe when they joined the Noghay traders who
herded horses to Moscow in spring and summer. The Noghays sold between 30,000
and 50,000 horses in Moscow every year, of which between 5,000 and 8,000 were
purchased by the Tsar. Since they kept the capital supplied, an escort was always sent
out to protect them and also to make sure that they sold no horses off en route. From
the instructions given to one such escort in July 1654 it is clear that Bukharans and
other merchants made a practice of travelling with this ordo-bazarnaya stanitsa and
that the escort, which on that occasion consisted of 352 armed men plus one guide
and four officials, was expected to defend the merchants as well as the Noghay horsedealers.
The overland route from Astrakhan to Moscow varied according to practical
considerations, but it generally followed the Volga to Tsaritsyn and then crossed the
steppes to Tambov and Moscow, although the merchants might call in at Samara, as
the Noghay horse-dealers did on returning from Moscow in June 1589. Because of
the abundance of marshes and rivers this journey was preferably undertaken in the
summer, when the roads were dry, or in the winter, when rivers were frozen hard,
and horses or sledges could travel quickly and safely along them.18
2. Overland

routes

from

Bukhara

to Astrakhan.

The great advantage of going overland to Astrakhan was that numbers of travellers
were not limited, as they were on the busa. All the routes went via Khwarazm and the
Yaik (Ural) river, passing either through Saraichik or through Yaitsk, later known as
Gur'ev.
a. Routes to Saraichik. These routes were older. The first, which Levshin calls the
Old Noghay route, went through Urganj. It called at the Kurkurtyuk/Kurkuruk,
Aktyuba, Aibabul/Aidobul and Uchkan wells, passing the well-known peski Sam
(sandpatch, quicksands?) en route, then went east of the Jizly mountains to the Emba
and crossed the Kainar mountains before reaching Saraichik. This took 25 to 26 days
from Khiva, according to Levshin, and presumably 23 or 24 days from Urganj, but a
far more optimistic estimate of time was given to Jenkinson's travelling companion,
Richard Johnson, in 1559. His two ‘Tartarian’ informers were in fact in agreement -

15 days would suffice for the journey from Saraichik to ‘Urgench’. However, they
added, this stretch, like the one from Bukhara, was ‘without habitation of houses’.
A variation on the Old Noghay route went further east across the Ust Urt initially,
using different wells on the way north, then it turned westwards and crossed the Jizly
mountains before joining the other route on the Emba.
A third route which was longer, but far more convenient according to Levshin,
went still further east and followed the Aral Sea.!9
From Saraichik to Astrakhan travellers either went along the shores of the
17 Kostomarov, 106. Avril, 117, 122.
18 Kostomarov, 106-7. Kurts, "Sochinenie", 325-7. A.J, IV, 214-7.
19 Leyshin, 180-1. Johnson, 480-1. Grigor'ev, "Opisanie", 108-18.

395

Bukharan trade

Caspian, or else sailed across if they wanted to avoid the marshes on the way. And
according to Johnson's informants, this took 10 days by land, ‘travailing by leysure’,
or 15 days by sea.?°
b. Route through Yaitsk/Gur'ev.2! In the seventeenth century this route seems to
have been used in preference to the one through Saraichik, especially after the stone
fort, begun by Mikhail Gur'ev in 1647, replaced the fishing post of 1620 and the
palisaded fort of 1640. The new fort was intended to offer protection and a breathingspace to merchants, for they were likely to be attacked by the Noghays, the Cossacks
or the Qalmaq on their way to Astrakhan. One route seems to have been very similar
to the first one through Saraichik. The other was identical up to the peski Sam, then
went back towards the Aral before turning inland towards the Emba.?? According to
Yuldashev the journey from Bukhara by this route took 9 to 12 weeks, and Golikova
explains that the 500 versts (about 328 miles or 524.8 km) between Yaitsk and

Astrakhan could be covered in 12 days, 2 additional days being needed if the journey
was undertaken by sea and the weather was stormy. The Khivan envoy Qutush
Bahadur with his suite and a guard cannot have had any problems, for it only took
them 12 days in 1644 to sail from Yaitsk to Astrakhan in a coastguard ‘strug’,
keeping close to the shores of the Caspian.?3

3. Route to Samara. Little is known about this route except that it avoided
Astrakhan altogether and went north of Saraichik, through the steppes, and crossing
Noghay territory. According to a group of 300 merchants, who travelled that way
with a caravan in 1613, a man on horseback could cover the distance between Urganj
and Samara in a month, but a caravan took 3 times as long, i.e. (presumably) 12
weeks. Since a further three weeks were needed to travel from Bukhara to Urganj, the
whole journey must have taken a caravan nearly four months.”4
4. Routes to Kazan'. There were several routes to Kazan', one from Astrakhan

which was used by the autumn caravans of 1616 and 1619, another from Samara,?5
and three others which started off separately - via Khiva and the western shores of the
Aral, due north across the Qizil Qum, along the Syr-Darya - but came together on the
Irgiz river. The combined route continued from the Irgiz in a north-westerly direction,
crossing the Yaik near modern Orenburg, then the Belaya river either before or after

the Bashkirian town of Ufa, and following the river Kama up to Kazan‘.26
The time taken for this journey was probably about nine weeks, for it took the
Tsar's envoy, Vel'yaminov Stepanov, 9 weeks to travel from Kazan' to the ‘Pegie
20 Tbid., 481.
21 There was another small town also known as Yaitsk further up the Yaik river, and it is now called
Ural'sk.
22 Dzhamolov, 284-5.

23 Yuldashev, K istorii torgovykh i posol'skikh svyazei, 63. Golikova, 29-30. Materialy, 187.
Dzhamoloy, 285.

24 Pamyatniki, XXI, 183.
25 Tbid., XXII, 276, 640 for merchants who went from Astrakhan to Kazan’ in 1616 and 1619; XXII,
168, for merchants sent from Samara to Kazan' in 1613.
26 Yuldashev, K istorii torgovykh i posol'skikh svyazei, 63, says merchants missed Ufa altogether
on this route. But this does not tie up with the fact that Bukharans are known to have travelled to
Kazan’ via Ufa in the early seventeenth century, or with the presence of Bukharan traders in Ufa in
the late sixteenth century. Pamyatniki, XXII, 277, 641-4; also XXI, 101.

396

Trade routes

gory’ mountains, which Yuldashev identifies as the mountains of the Talasskii Ala
Tau north-east of Tashkent.27 Stepanov had been sent to see Tawakkul and since the
Qazaq Prince was then on bad terms with ‘Abdallah, he was presumably camping a
good distance from Tashkent, which means that on balance the journey from Kazan'
to Bukhara could have taken just as long. On the evidence available it is impossible to
estimate the relative importance of this route, but it is known that one Bukharan went
to Kazan’ from Ufa in November 1616 and that 12 merchants made the same journey
in December 1619.
From Kazan’, if permitted to do so, merchants continued to Moscow, this part of
the journey taking 4 to 8 weeks by boat and probably longer overland. They also
went east to Muscovite Siberia along numerous routes known to have crossed the
Urals, two of the most popular ones being the route through Verkhotur'e, adopted

after 1598, and ‘the old Kungur route’ from Ufa to Tyumen'.?8
III

Routes to Siberia 29

The main town visited was Tobol'sk, but Bukharans also travelled to Tara, Tyumen’,
Turinsk, Tomsk, Yeniseisk, Krasnoyarsk, Irkutsk, and Kyakhta, going on from
these towns, either eastwards to the encampments of the fur-trapping nomads of

eastern Siberia and thence to China, or else westwards to Muscovy.20
1. Routes

to Tobol'sk.

The two main routes were described in detail in a report requested by Peter the Great
which was submitted to him in 1697. The Tobol'sk voevoda Andryushka Naryshkin
who compiled the report had closely interrogated a number of travellers for this
purpose, including Fedor Skibin and Vas'ka Kobyakov who had recently returned
from a mission to the Qazaq Prince Tauka.
a. Route 1. The first part of this journey led travellers to Turkestan across the Qizil
Qum desert and normally took 14/2 days. Camels were essential for the first six
days, as water had to be carried as far as Ashtly.3! The next 81/2 days to Turkestan
were easier and could be done on horseback, water being available from four wells on
the way and also from the Syr-Darya. Dzhamolov says there was another route to
Turkestan which went via the Zeravshan, Samarqand and Sairam, on which

presumably merchants had no problems with water.*?
From Turkestan the route split in two around an unnamed mountain, one part
27 Materialy, 294.
28 Yuldashev, K istorii torgovykh i posol'skikh svyazei, 94. Vilkov, "Torgovye puti", 59-66. See
Ziyaev, Ekonomicheskie svyazi, 56-7 for a certain Mansurov who took goods from Kazan’ to
Tobol'sk in 1687. See also above for Mulla Farrukh's son who crossed the Urals in 1672 on his
way to Kazan’ and Astrakhan.

29 Some of these routes will be found in the ‘routes to China’ map.

30 Ziyaev, Ekonomicheskie svyazi, 55-9, 66, 68, 71-2. TSGADA, fond 1121, op.1F, no.444, 1699,
list 28; no.128, 1688, list 92. Cahen, pass. Rumyantsev, 387. Materialy, 109.

31 Not traced.
32 "Sysknoe delo", 400-1. Materialy, 266. Dzhamolov, 289, says that Hajji Farrukh travelled this

way in 1674, but his reference to the manuscript source is incorrect so that it is impossible to
confirm whether this was indeed the route chosen by the ambassador in question.

397

Bukharan trade

going due north, and the other branching off to the west along the Syr Darya, passing
through Yuzugant before rejoining the other route.33 The remainder of the journey
was mainly due north, except for the last lap of the journey along the Irtysh. Portage
was required six times on the way, once across the rivers Sary Su, Kynyrbai (Qara
Turgai?),Vagai and Irtysh, and twice across the Ishim. Numerous swamps were
encountered en route, as well-as a multitude of rivulets, steep-banked muddy rivers

and woods. There was also a narrow mountain defile along the Sary Su through
which travellers had to go in single file for two days. All this made the greater part of
this route unsuitable for carts, and merchants had to rely on horses and camels.
Many other problems had to be tackled en route. Robbers ambushed travellers at
regular intervals. There was no food or fuel just north of Turkestan, which meant that
food supplies had to be carried and that merchants had to rely for fuel on horse dung
or on willow twigs which they purchased expensively from local people. Finally, the
yellowish reeds, the stagnant water and the prickly grass found between the Sary Su
and Kynyrbai rivers were highly dangerous and resulted in illness and even in death
for both men and beasts.
The whole journey on this route took a little over 11 weeks if travelling slowly
and 61/2 if travelling ‘fast’, ie., presumably on horseback.>4
b. Route 2. The second route which Fedor Skibin, in his report to Naryshkin, called
the Spring Route, differed from the first one only in the latter part of the journey.
After crossing the Ishim at the ford known as Kamennyi brod, the route turned west,
crossing the Ishim again at the Ulugh Taq bend and making for the Tobol river,
which it then followed past nine settlements and across several small rivers, up to
Tobol'sk. This ordynskaya doroga, which as its name suggests was probably
favoured by the various hordes of nomads, had several advantages: the territory
crossed was mainly inhabited, travellers went through flat, even steppes instead of
mountains, there was plenty of food for men and beasts, and the distance from
Kamennyi brod to Tobol'sk took 10 days instead of 30. This reduced the overall
journey to about nine weeks (between 62 and 66 days) for a caravan and about 32

days on horseback.35
c. Route 3. The third route to Tobol'sk traversed the Qalmaq encampments and took
between 40 and 42 days. It was mentioned by Mulla Farrukh in 1671 and also a few
years earlier by a group of Dutch exiles living in Tobol'sk who said that Bukharan
merchants generally travelled this way twice a year. Nothing else is known about it,
but it was probably more direct than either of the others and may well have gone

through Kashghariya, as it did in the early nineteenth century.36

33 Yuzugant has not been traced.
34 "Sysknoe delo", 396-8. Materialy, 263-5. Naryshkin says the total distance between Tobol'sk
and Turkestan could be covered in 9 weeks (63 days) if going slowly, two months at average speed
and 30 days if travelling fast, but in fact the time needed was somewhat longer. As can be seen
after adding up his time estimates for the various sections, a total of at least 65!/2 days was needed,
and 691/2 days if using the Yuzugant detour.

35 "Sysknoe delo", 401. Materialy, 266-7.
36 TsGADA, fond 109, op.1, 1669-75 kn.1, list 31b. Beschreibung, 21-22. Dzhamolov, 290, says

that Mulla Farrukh followed the ‘ordynskaya doroga’. See Poujol, "Notice", for the route from
Yarkand to Semipalatinsk on the Irtysh which is situated very near Lake Yamysh.

398

Trade routes

d. Route 4. This went via Lake Yamysh and then along the Irtysh. Its great advantage
was that from Yamysh merchants could travel in the company of the armed convoy of
over 700 Muscovite officials who, from 1619 onwards, went yearly to get salt from
the lake. This was also the route followed by Hajji Farrukh, who joined the convoy
of doshchaniki (flat-bottomed boats) at Yamysh in 1674. Sometimes merchants
would only go as far as Tara, or else they might cross the Irtysh some 10-13 miles
south of Tara in order to continue the journey across country. No clear indication is
available about the early part of this route between Bukhara and Yamysh, but
Dzhamolov thinks it likely that merchants went from Turkestan to the Sary Su, then

along the Sary Su and across to the Irtysh.37
2. Routes

to Tara.

Several routes were possible, one ‘across the steppes’, others through ‘Kalmyk
land’. There was also a route through Kashghariya and along the Irtysh which in
1635-6 went through the camp of the Qalmaq Kuisha in the Tarbagatay mountains
south of Lake Zaysan. Bukharans were certainly very interested in Tara and
merchants travelled there in the seventeenth century either on their own, or else with a
caravan, some caravans numbering as few as 6 merchants, others as many as 33. The

records show that in the sixty-one years between 1637 and 1698 as many as 75
merchants reached Tara on their own, while 169 went there as members of caravans.
Merchants also travelled to Tara from Tobol'sk, which took only 7 to 9 days by
sledge in the winter, but as many as 21 days if sailing along the Irtysh in the

summer.38
3. Routes

to Tyumen’,

Tomsk,

Krasnoyarsk,

Yeniseisk,

Irkutsk.

Little is known about the routes used, but Bakhrushin says that the age-old route from
Bukhara to Tyumen’ branched off of the ‘ordynskaya doroga’ to Tobol'sk, and that
from Tyumen’ Bukharans travelled to Turinsk and Muscovy. Merchants are also
known to have visited Krasnoyarsk, probably after calling at the Qalmaq
encampments, and they appear to have called at Yeniseisk on their way to China from
Siberia. The only evidence available about Bukharans in Irkutsk shows that, after
leaving this town, Bukharan merchants went north via Tunkinsk, then west via

Krasnoyarsk and Turinsk,with an escort provided by the voevoda in order to protect
them from Buryat attacks.39

Routes to Iran

There is little contemporary evidence regarding these routes although there is no doubt

37 TsGADA, fond 109, op.1, 1669-75 kn.1, list 73b. See Materialy, 297, for the crossing-points
on the Ishim, south of Tara. Miller, II, 34, 36, 93, 95, 110, 221-2. Materialy po istorii russkomongol'skikh otnoshenii, I, 26. Dzhamolov, 290.
38 Materialy, 354-5, 362. Materialy po istorii russko-mongol'skikh otnoshenii, 26-27. Kuisha
may have already been camping there when he sent the Bukharan Kazi Kaziev on to Tara in 16334. Ziyaev, Ekonomicheskie svyazi, 58, 61, 64, 65. Alekseev, "Neizvestnoe opisanie", 172.
39 Bakhrushin, Nauchnye
no.128, list 92.

trudy, 1V, 197, 202. Rumyantsey, 341. TsGADA,

399

fond 1121, op.1F,

Bukharan trade

‘that, despite their hatred of the Shi‘a heresy, Bukharan Sunnis did considerable trade
with Iran in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
1. Routes

to Mashhad.

The first route proceeded via Qarakil, Farab and Chahar Juy where merchants
crossed the Amu-Darya to continue across the Qara Qum desert to Marw. The Qara
Qum was so arid that caravans are thought to have stopped every 15 or 22 km,
instead of the usual 32 km. The ancient stopping-places which Masson excavated on
the route leading northwards from Marw seem to confirm his theory. And if this was
the norm everywhere in the Qara Qum, then the journey from Bukhara to Marw
should have taken 15 days, as 4 days were required between Bukhara and Chahar
Jay, and 11 would have been needed to cover the distance of circa 211 km between
Chahar Jay and Marw. However, Efremov, who lived as a slave in Central Asia
during the latter part of the eighteenth century, allowed only 6 days for the stretch
between Chahar Jay and Marw, which means that caravans must have managed about
35 km per day on that route. But it was impossible to travel this way any quicker, as
the Iranian ruler, Nadir Shah, would find to his‘cost in 1740. When he tried to make
his soldiers march between 62 and 68 km per day from Chahar Jiy, after having a
large number of wells dug and lined with wood in preparation for their journey, he

lost a large number of men, horses and cattle.4°
Another route from Bukhara to Marw went via Qarshi, Balkh, Andkhud and
Chul. Nadir Muhammad travelled this way from _Balkh when fleeing from the
Mughals in summer 1646, and he covered the stretch from Andkhud to Marw in

seven days.41
Yet another route, found in the Historical Atlas of Iran, went due west from

Balkh to Marw-i rud/Maruchaq and then northwards along the Murghab river to

Marw.42
From Marw the route to Mashhad crossed the river Murghab and apparently
passed through Sarakhs. Dzhamolov says that the whole journey from Bukhara to
Mashhad via Chahar Juy took four weeks, but the Pazukhins took a full 37 days to

cover this distance.43
2. Routes to Shamakhi

and Baku.

Dzhamolov describes the route from Astarabad to Shamakhi as going through
Farhabad, Rasht, Langar (Lenkoran?) and Baku. He adds that the whole journey
40 Masson, "Srenevekovye puti", 60, 76-8. Bykov, 77-78. In 1879 Russian staff captain Bykov,
who surveyed the area thoroughly, gave the distance between Bukhara and the river crossing at

Chahar Jay as 99 versts (105km), and estimated 4 days for the trip. Efremov, 132, also allowed 4

days between Bukhara and Chahar Jiy. "Nakaz", 67. According to Pazukhin, one had to allow

seven days just for the distance between Bukhara and Chahar Jay.
4] |
ahauri, II, 658, 656. Chal has not been traced, but appears to have been situated in the province
of Balkh, for the Alman who attacked the Mughal forces at Khanabad in 1647 fled there to escape
reprisals.
42 Historical Atlas, 19.

43 Dzhamolov, 285. "Nakaz", 67, 70, 72. Vambéry, Travels, 428, 414, who travelled in Central

Asia in the late 19th century, said that although there was a route between Mashhad
and Bukhara

which took only 10 days, caravans had to go via Herat, which took 30 days. And according
to
Hagemeister, 296, the route from Herat to Mashhad was good in the 1840s, but took
9 days.

400

Trade routes

from Bukhara to Shamakhi took four weeks which cannot possibly be correct if the
distance between Bukhara and Mashhad took between 28 and 37 days. In fact,
according to the detailed information painstakingly collected on behalf of the
Muscovite Privy Council in 1675, travellers had to allow 31 days for the distance
from Baku to Astarabad via Lenkoran and Farhabad, plus another 12 between
Astarabad and Mashhad.*4 And if one or two additional days were required from
Baku to Shamakhi and 28 to 37 days for the journey from Bukhara to Mashhad, then
the total journey from Bukhara to Shamakhi must have taken 73 to 82 days, or 10!/2
to 11!/2 weeks. From Shamakhi Bukharans would often continue northwards along
the western shores of the Caspian to Terki where they bought madder, and they might
go on from there to Astrakhan.45
A different route via Astarabad figures on Bartol'd's map. It went from Bukhara
to Marw, Sarakhs, Nishapur, Isfara’in, Astarabad and Amul, then southwards to Rai
(Ray), and on to Teheran, Qazwin, Sultaniya, Ardabil and Shamakhi.
Two other routes are mentioned by Baikova. The first of these, which was
apparently very important in the eighth century, was identical to Bartol'd's up to
Nishapur. Then, instead of turning north-west to Isfara’in and Astarabad, it continued
due west to Sabzawar, Bistam, Damghan, Semnan, Rai and Hamadan, before turning

north towards Ardabil. The stretch from Sabzawar to Semnan and Rai must have been
particularly busy, for it carried armies as well as peaceful travellers on their way
between the khanate and the main towns of Qazwin, Teheran and Isfahan.
Baikova's second route is not very detailed, but appears to have been much
longer. It went south of the Dasht-i Kabir desert, making first for Herat, probably via
Balkh, Andkhud and Maimana. From Herat it seems to have gone north to Nishapur
before turning southwards to Yazd, Aberkukh and Shiraz, and then northwards

towards Hamadan and Shamakhi.*6
In Shamakhi Bukharans had several trade ‘rows’ of their own and were probably
accomodated in the ‘tezik’ caravanserai which Tsar Mikhail's trading agent Kotov
saw there in 1623.47

3. Routes to Isfahan, Qazwin

and Kashan.

These routes would have gone through Marw, Nishapur, Bistam and Rai like
Baikova's first route and it is known that merchants from the khanate stayed at the

Muhammad Bik caravanserai in Isfahan.48Although each of the four khans who went
to Isfahan during the seventeenth century called at Mashhad on the way to Nishapur
and paid his respects to the shrine of Imam Rida, merchants probably avoided
Mashhad, going due west from Marw through Abivard, as marked on Bartol'd's
map, and then south to Nishapur. This enabled them to save time as well as the

payment of transit or other dues, while avoiding dangerous confrontations with Shi'a
pilgrims on their way to the shrine. Avril gives no details about the route from Isfahan
44 Dzhamolov, 286. Russko-indiiskie otnosheniya, 219. Sadly no details are given here about the
stretcht between Astarabad and Mashhad.

45 AL, V, 141.
46 Bartol'd, Sochineniya, IX. Baikova, Rol’, 23-24. The stretch between Herat and Yazd is based on
Bartol'd's tracing of ancient trade routes.

47 Pogodin, 4.
48 Anon. A description. See Pamyatniki, XX, 257, 268, for the presence of Bukharan traders in
Kashan in the late sixteenth century.

401

Bukharan trade

to Bukhara but says that it was used frequently by ambassadors from either side in the
late seventeenth century and that the journey (850 miles or 1,360 km as the crow
flies) took one and a half months.4?

V_ Routes to India
1. Via Herat and Qandahar.>°
This route went via Chahar Ji, Marw, Sarakhs, Mashhad, Herat and Qandahar. It

probably took about two months altogether, one month being needed for the stretch
from Mashhad to Qandahar, or so the Muscovite Privy Council was told in about
1675. From Qandahar merchants either turned north-east towards Kabul, continuing
towards Peshawar and Lahore, or else they headed south down the Bolan Pass to
Dadur and Shirkapur, then north up the Indus valley to Multan. According to the
Soviet historian Baikova this route had several advantages, for it was neither as
mountainous nor as cold as the route through the Hindu Kush and Balkh, and it
passed through many towns and villages well provided with caravanserais and
moneylenders who could give the merchants credit. This is why, she says, it was
preferred by Indian merchants and was by far the most popular route for all traders.
No confirmation of this, however, has been found in the sources consulted.5! On the
contrary, there is abundant contemporary evidence to suggest that Bukharan
merchants generally travelled to India from Balkh and that this was the route favoured
by ambassadors, from Mir Quraish in 1586 to Kasimov in 1676. And it is interesting
to note that both the Bukharan and the Iranian merchants whom Gribov consulted in
1647-8 thought it preferable to go from Mashhad to India via Balkh rather than

through Qandahar.52
2. Routes

from Balkh.

The two main problems on these routes were the high mountains to be traversed, and
the Afghan tribesmen, whose attacks on travellers were particularly feared near

Jalalabad and at the Khyber Pass.°3
a. Balkh to Kabul. There were several routes covering the distance of some 350 miles
(560 km) between Balkh and Kabul. Gribov was told that the journey took 11 days
by horse, and twice as long by camel, but Shaikh Baba gave a more conservative
estimate of the time needed on horseback, which he said was 15 days. Five routes are
listed by Lahauri and described at length. He explains that the route through Qunduz
was passable from 22 June in good years, that the one via Ghurband and Ghuri
opened a month later and it seems that, apart from the route via Kahmard, most were
only passable during 4 to 5 months of the year. Khanykov, who made a thorough
study of trade in Central Asia in the first part of the nineteenth century, wrote,

49 Avril, 93.
50 For further details about all the routes to India see Burton "Itinéraires".
51 Baikova, Rol’, 21-22, 29. Russko-indiiskie otnosheniya, 219. According to Hagemeister, 296,

the journey from Herat to Kabul took 15-16 days, but the route was very bad and mountainous.

52 Russko-indiiskie otnosheniya, 81.

53 Mahmid b. Wali, More tain, 35.
402

Trade routes

however, that the journey was never attempted during the winter.54

Prince Murad Bakhsh chose the route from Kabul to Qunduz when he marched to
Balkh, but experienced many difficulties en route becuase he set off too early in the
year, on 6 June 1646. After reaching Charikaran he found that the road ahead was
blocked by snow two yards deep which had to be cleared before he could continue.
He then proceeded up the Panjshir river to the Khavak pass and turned north-west
towards Qunduz, sending three detachments via Bamian to take Kahmard and Ghuri
in the west. The men were told to meet him as soon as possible at Khulm, between
Qunduz and Balkh, but they had a very difficult journey, due to the extreme
narrowness of the high mountain path between Kahmard and Ghuri, which could
only be negotiated by a few men at a time. It took them a month to get from
Charikaran to Ghuri and they do not appear to have made the rendez-vous in

Khulm.*5
Aurangzib set off even earlier in the year, but had no difficulties because he chose
to go due north from Kahmard to Darra-yi Gaz, which was relatively free from snow.
As a result, although he left Kahmard on 29 May, he arrived in Balkh only five days
later on 4 June 1647. The narrow pass of Darra-yi Gaz, situated in the Elburz
mountains, some 5 farsangs/31.25 km from Balkh, was apparently open most of the
year. And as for Kahmard, even during the 7 or 8 months of the year when the
Panjshir (Hindu Kush) was closed by snow, it was accessible. Kahmard was
therefore a major port of call for caravans. Because of this, its Customs post was an
important landmark on the route between Kabul and Balkh and it is mentioned by
Mahmid b. Wali who travelled to and from India in 1625 and 1630.56
Snow was not the only problem faced by travellers on the Hindu Kush. The
mountain itself was unstable, a mere shout at the summit could loosen stones which
might then be hurled about by the wind with devastating results. And, according to
Mahmid b. Wali, snowstorms and hailstorms were accompanied by lightning of such
incredible power that it often caused whole caravans to perish.>7
b. Kabul to Lahore. From Kabul merchants and other travellers went past Jalalabad,
the Khyber Pass and Peshawar to Attock, where they were expected to pay major
Customs dues, then on to Hasan Abdal and Lahore. The complete journey from
Balkh, according to the merchants whom Gribov consulted in Isfahan in 1648, took

30 days by horse and 60 days by camel, and this would have been a journey of some
660 miles (1,056 km) as the crow flies. The same merchants told Gribov that a man

on horseback would take 12 days from Lahore to Delhi, and a further 4 days from
Delhi to Agra, if he managed to avoid the enormous bands of robbers which infested
the area.58 But they failed to mention that travel on the way to Kabul came to a stop in
winter and was very slow in spring, and also that the road through the Khyber Pass
went along the bed of several torrents and became very dangerous in the case of

54 TsGADA,

fond 77, op.2, 1646 no.2, listy 75b-76a.

Materialy,

317. Lahauri,

II, 669-70.

Khanykov, Opisanie, 174.
55 The whole journey was about 450-70 km. Prince Murad arrived in Khulm on the day they set off
from Ghuri and they are unlikely to have reached Khulm, about 140 km away, before he left
Khulm the following day. Lahauri, II, 508, 512-3, 521-5, 534.

56 | Ahauri, II, 669, 508-37, 671-3, 686. Mahmid b. Wali, More tain, 46, 73.
57 Tbid., 89.
58 TsGADA, fond 77, op.2, 1646 no.2, listy 75-77.

403

Bukharan trade

sudden rain.>?
An alternative route, which was mentioned to the Muscovite authorities in 1675,

was quicker, taking only 21/2 weeks by horse and 5 by camel to Lahore, plus an extra
5 days on horseback for the stretch from Lahore to Agra. This route is unfortunately
not described in detail but it began by going south to Multan and then went north-east

to Lahore.©9
3. Routes

through

Badakhshan.

There seem to have been at least two routes to India through Badakhshan which had
the advantage of avoiding Kabul and the marauding bands of the Khyber Pass
altogether, although they had to cross the much higher Pamir mountains. One route
passed through Balkh, Tashkurgan (Khulm), Taliqan and Faizabad. The other went
via Samargand to Kulab, Rustaq and Faizabad. At Faizabad these routes merged, then
followed the Amu-Darya and turned south towards Chitral, continuing down the
Indus either as far as Dera Ghazi Khan, from where merchants could reach Multan, or
only as far as Attock, where they joined the main route from Kabul to Lahore.®!
4. Routes

to Multan.

Several routes existed and very lively contacts were maintained throughout, there
being many Multanis residing in Samarqand in the late sixteenth century.2 Apart
from the route via Chitral just mentioned, merchants could, and did, get there from
Kabul, Lahore or Delhi. In the seventeenth century this was said to take under a week
from Kabul, ‘half a week’ from Lahore and one week from Delhi.®? From Kabul two
routes were possible, both of which passed Ghazni. After Ghazni the first went due
east, reaching the Indus at Dera Isma‘il Khan and following it southwards as far as
Dera Ghazi Khan. The second turned south-west towards Qandahar and then made
for the Indus via Quetta, the Bolan Pass and Shirkapur.

Routes to Kashghariya

According to Mahmud b. Wali the caravan route to Kashghar went via Arkhang-Sarai
and then passed Taliqan,°* where there was a Customs post. He probably had in
mind the route to Kashghar via Faizabad, Ishkashim and Yarkand which is shown in
Bartol'd's map and which was followed in 1812 by Mir ‘Izzat Ullah. Ritter, who

quotes Mir ‘Izzat Ullah, says that this was an easy route for carts and that 45 days

were needed to travel between Bukhara and Yarkand.®5
59 Elphinstone, II, 43.
60 Russko-indiiskie otnosheniya 218.

61 Abaeva ,Ocherki, 66. Grulev, 113-26. Mac Gregor, II, 372.
62 Mukminova, "Skupshchiki", pass. Fitrat, nos.57, 58.
63 Russko-indiiskie otnosheniya, 218. N.B. In the list compiled by the Tsar's Privy Council in
1675 Delhi is referred to as Janabad, i.e. Shahjahanabad, and this name is still used occasionally
nowadays, because the town was founded by Shah Jahan. Tavernier, Les six voyages, 1676 ed.,

351, was more optimistic about the time taken to reach Multan from the khanate, declaring that it

only took three days from Balkh.

64 Arkhang-Sarai has not been found.
65 Mahmid b. Wali, More tain, 19, 60. Ritter, Zemlevedenie, 210-1. This seems to have been

404

Trade routes

Ritter also mentions a northern route to Kashghar via Farghana, which was
slower because the extreme altitude made breathing difficult for travellers. It was
passable most of the year, however, except during the three summer months, when it
was inundated by melting snow. This was probably the route mentioned by Abaeva
which went from Samarqand (along the Syr-Darya, then) through the Terek pass and
Irkeshtam.
A rather similar route marked on Bartol'd's map went through Samarqand,
Akhsiket, Ush and Uzgend, and then throught the Yassy and Tash-Rabat passes.
Finally, there was an ancient route which went past Tirmidh, Karategin and the
Alai mountains to Kashghar, and which probably crossed the Terek Pass.®7

VII

Routes to China

Many of these routes went via Kashghar, but the precise point reached in China is
difficult to identify as it is not generally mentioned in contemporary sources. It was of
course a very long journey, the distance between Bukhara and Beijing being some
3,100 miles (4,960 km) as the crow flies.
Chinese records are particularly sketchy, for they only mention that ‘tributebearing’ missions from Samarqand came via Turfan, that those from Bukhara and
Balkh travelled via Hami, and that no more than 35 people from each mission were

allowed into the capital.®8
A far more precise idea of the route was obtained in China by the seventeenthcentury missionary Gerbillon, but his informant, the envoy of the ruler of Hami, only
supplied him with information about the stretch between Hami and Bukhara. He
explained that this had taken him five months because he had made a detour, going
north-west of Hami and through Turkestan (presumably avoiding Sairam and going
cross country from Turkestan to Bukhara), as this was a very safe and convenient
road. The shorter route, which was less safe and more difficult, went through Turfan,

Aksu and Yarkand to Bukhara and took about three months altogether, viz. about 20
days from China to Hami, 7 days from Hami to Turfan, 23 days from Turfan to
Aksu, 10 days from Aksu to Yarkand (via Kashghar?) and 1 month from Yarkand to

Bukhara. Two particular problems in the 100 leagues between Turfan and Hami were
the rocky ground, and the scarcity of forage and water, but a caravan could cover this
distance in seven days. A far more serious problem was apparently the hostile
behaviour of a tribe of Muslims called the Hassak Puruk. These Muslims, whom
Gerbillon also described as ‘Uzbek Tartars’ and as the inveterate foes of the Eleuths
or Qalmaq, were in fact the Qazaqs and they were said to spare no one. Travellers,

what Abaeva calls the real Silk Route, and, according to Bartol'd's map, it certainly continued to
the west, going to Iran via Herat, Nishapur and Damghan. Abaeva, Ocherki, 58-59. Bartol'd, map

"Srednyaya Aziya" in Sochineniya, IX. Hagemeister, 296, is more pessimistic about the time
taken between Bukhara and Yarkand on this route which he gives as 65 days, using camels and
horses. This was probably because the region had become unsafe by the late 1830s and caravans
had to make long detours in order to avoid attacks by the predatory rulers of the area.
66 Ritter, Zemlevedenie, 210-1. Abaeva, Ocherki, 58. Barto'ld, as above.
67 Baikova (Rol’, 24) seems to refer to this route although she omits to mention Kashghar.

68 Mindai, 722, 728, 734, 736, 748, 750. Ming

Shih, ch. 332, 8626. Fairbanks,

153, 155.

Bretschneider, "Chinese intercourse", 181, says that the missions from Balkh and Bukhara could
not exceed 25 in number.

405

Bukharan._

trade

therefore, had to be ready to fight their way through! °°

More optimistic estimates of time were given to Van Klenk and to Siberian
officals, but no information appears to have been received concerning the point or
points of entry into China. Van Klenk was told of a route from Bukhara through the
Qalmaq encampments which took just over 30 days, but his information is sadly
incomplete. It includes no names of the towns visited en route and only mentions that
travellers had to go through ‘deserts and waterless places’. The information collected
by Siberian officials in 1616 was hardly more detailed: the journey from Savran to
China took two months, plus an additional six days between Bukhara and Savran.
Mahmid b. Wali's paraphrase of the information found in the fourteenth century
manual of geography and cosmography by Mustaufi is more explicit, for it mentions a
route from Kashghar to China via Khotan. It is also more pessimistic, for it gives the
time taken from Khotan to China as four months, to which another 37 to 52 days
would have had to be added from Bukhara to Khotan, assuming that Khotan to
Yarkand took 7 days and that the stretch between Bukhara and Yarkand was covered
either in 30 days, as reported by Gerbillon, or in 45 days as recorded by Mir ‘Izzat
Ullah. The whole journey would have thus taken about 5!/2 months, but the point of
entry into China is not known.7°
There was more than one reason for the nee reticence about the location of
such points of entry. On the one hand there was so little precise knowledge about
China itself that a wealth of geographical detail migh have confused the enquirer. On
the other hand there were many different places, situated a great distance apart, on or
just inside the Great Wall, where merchants who went to China were made to stop
and trade, and they may have felt that they would lose face by admitting that they had
only reached the frontier, or the periphery, of the fabled Cathay. In the case of
Gerbillon's informant he might have thought the journey from Hami to Bukhara more
exotic and therefore of greater interest than the journey to China, which his
countrymen undertook, as a matter of course, every few years.
The most detailed and reliable information about routes followed and total time
required in order to reach China comes from the following sixteenth and seventeenth
century sources: - the ‘Tartarian’ informant of Richard Johnson, the Bukharans
whom Louis XIV's envoy, the missionary Philippe Avril, met in Astrakhan, the
Jesuits who settled in China, and the various envoys sent to China by the Tsar from
1653 onwards.
Richard Johnson was told in Bukhara in 1559 that there were two routes. The
first route, for which he had no details, was said to take exactly two months, one

month from ‘Boghar’ to ‘Cascar’ and another month from ‘Cascar’ to Cathay. The
second route was said to be easier if travelling with goods, although much longer. It
was described fully with the time taken on each stage and the name of the town
reached on the frontier. According to Johnson's informant, a ‘Tartarian merchant

dwelling in the citie of Boghar’, one had to allow 14 days from Bukhara to Tashkent,
plus 7 days to ‘Occieut’ (probably Akhsiket), 20 days to Kashghar, 30 days to
Sowchick on the Chinese border, and a further month plus five days to reach Cathay
itself (Beijing), or a total of 104 to 106 days i.e. nearly 4 months to Beijing and only
69 Du Halde, IV, 53-54, 41. Interestingly enough, Gerbillon uses the same term Uzbek Tatars

elewhere (96) when referring to the inhabitants of the khanate and their trade with China.

70 Van Klenk, 342. Materialy po istorii russko-mongol'skikh otnoshenii, 1, 54, 49. Mahmid b.
Wali, More tain, 39. Du Halde, IV, 54. Ritter, Vostochnyi ili kitaiskii Turkestan, 111, 211.

406

Trade routes

2 months and 11 days to the Chinese frontier.7!
The town of Sowchick appears to correspond to the town called Suchou by Goés,
Succuir by Ramusio, Suchen by Alvaro Semmedo, Su chou fou by Du Halde and
Soczi by Avril. This was a major Chinese centre for the rhubarb trade situated close to
the frontier in the province of Se chwen, and a month from Beijing. Sowchick is
known to have been visited by the merchants of the khanate, both because Semmedo
mentions that envoys from ‘the king... of Samarcan’ went there, and because, as

mentioned above, Bukharans specialised in the purchase of Chinese rhubarb.72 The
most likely modern successor to Su chou fou seems to be the modern town of
Changyeh, which is not only in the Se chwen province, but also very near the Great
Wall. From there merchants may have taken a south-easterly direction, passing the
town of Lyangchou (modern Wuwei) where rhubarb was also available for sale and

where the merchants of Samarqand used to sell their horses in the days of Tamerlane,
and following the Wei Ho and Huang Ho rivers before turning north towards
Beijing.”> There was also a northern route via Tashkent, Sairam, Almalik and
Bishbalik which according to Rossabi ended in Su chou in the fifteenth century,

although it earlier continued along the Wei Ho and Huang Ho as far as Loyang.74
From Kashghar to Su chou merchants had the choice of two routes, either the one
through Aksu, Turfan and Hami which was mentioned to Gerbillon, or the southern

route through Khotan and Dunhuang (Tunhuang) to Anhsi which is marked on

Franck and Brownstone's map.75
Avril's informant, a Bukharan merchant who had completed four journeys
between Astrakhan and Beijing, described two routes to China, adding that either way
the borders of China could be reached in under two months. The first route went in a
south-easterly

direction

from

Bukhara

to Samarqand,

Kabul,

Kashmir

and

“‘Barantola’, a town in Tibet which could have been modern Bulantai, although it has
also been suggested that this was Lhasa.76 By this route the traveller reached Soczi
where the best rhubarb in the world grew. The second route went due east
‘directement 4 l'Est...au milieu des Monguls, qui bien qu'Idolatres, sont soumis au
Roy des Yousbecs’, ending up at ‘Kokutan’, a town strongly fortified against the
Qalmaq which was situated outside the Great Wall ‘dans un pais assez désert’, 8 to 10
days from the Great Wall and 15 days from Beijing.”” Sadly no further details were
given about this route, but it probably went through the encampments of the Farghana
Qirghiz (the idolatrous Mongols in question?), Aksu and Anhsi to Kokutan. This
town had been identified by Baddeley as Kwei hwa, and if he is right, then we can

take it to be the modern Kwei sui or Huhehot, which is certainly due east from Aksu

71 Johnson, 480-1.
72 Yule, IV, 242; I, CCXIV. Semmedo, 26-27. Du Halde, I, 215; II, 242. Avril, 87.
73 Du Halde, A description, 1, 13. Bretschneider, Mediaeval researches, 258. Franck and
Brownstone, maps The Silk Road in Roman-Han Times and The Silk Road in early T'ang and
Moslem Times. Merchants might have also gone directly to Lyangchou from Tibet.

74 Rossabi, 48. Franck and Brownstone. Map The Silk Road.
75 Ibid. This was probably the route mentioned by Mustaufi and Mahmud b. Wali.
76 Avril, 142. Baddeley, II, 226, says that the ‘Kabul’ in question was probably Khamul/Hami, but

this cannot have been the case in this instance if the next destination was Kashmir. However, it is

true that Hami was also known as Camul or Komul in the middle ages. The editors of Russkokitaiskie otnosheniya (1, 549n.54) say that Barantola was the Mongol name for Tibet.

77 Avril, 87-88, 143.
407

Bukharan

trade

and Ahnsi and much nearer to Beijing than Su chou.’8
Avril was given an optimistic view of the route and its difficulties by his
informant. He insisted that the route to China was neither as difficult nor as long as
most people imagined. The deserts were no worse, the precautions to be taken were
identical to those required in other eastern countries, and food was just as abundant.
As for the ‘Hordes Tartares’ met on the way, they were not only safe - ‘l'argent
n'étant point en usage parmi ces peuples errans, on couroit moins de risque d'étre
volé qu'on ne fait dans les Etats du Grand-Seigneur’, they were even helpful to
travellers - ‘(elles) se font un plaisir de les soulager, & de leur fournir les vivres dont
ils peuvent avoir besoin’. Although the shifting sand dunes on the way, and the
Qalmag tribes, did cause some difficulty, this was the route which the Muscovites
themselves preferred to use. They were even prepared to go from Tobol'sk to Kazan’
and Bukhara, Avril was told, so that they could travel to China with the “Yousbecs’,
although this meant that they too had to pay tribute to the overall khan of the Qalmaq,
the Khoshout Ochirtu. And it is known from other sources that from 1674 Ochirtu's

encampment was situated about 10 days from Bukhara and 2 months from China.”
Less optimistic accounts of the difficulties and the time needed for the journey to
China were collected by Jenkinson and by Spatharii. Jenkinson was told in 1558 that
the journey took nine months. Spatharii was warned in 1675 that the route to Sukchi
was very difficult owing to the lack of water which caused the loss of many packanimals, and that the stretch from Sukchi to Beijing would take over a month. His
informant, a man from Turfan, painted a far blacker picture than Avril's Bukharan
merchant. He estimated a full 100 days for the distance between Samarqand and
Kokotan, which would have probably meant 110 days from Bukhara.8° However, he
too seemed to agree that the danger from the Qalmaq ‘and others’ would be minimal,
and would only arise between Kokotan and Turfan, after which travellers would go
past the encampments of Ochirtu's Qalmaq and presumably be safe.®!
There were also several routes to China from Siberia which were used by Siberian
Bukharans, Muscovites and Qalmaq traders and which, Avril was told, took.a
maximum of six months from Tobol'sk. These routes may have also been used by the
merchants of the khanate, but only if and when the more direct routes from Bukhara
were impassable. Although they too supplied Siberia with Chinese goods, they
generally did so by a roundabout route which took them from Bukhara to China and
back via Bukhara to Tobol'sk in 5!/2 months, or so the Danish captives held in

Siberia were told in the 1660s.82
Some of these routes are described in rather more detail than others, but here too,
as in the case of routes from Bukhara, the point of entry into China is generally not
stated, which means that estimates of time do not offer conclusive evidence. Even

when the point of entry is given, hardly any detail is offered about the journey from
there to Beijing. The Tsar's ambassadors, who kept exhaustive diaries, seem to have
recorded the minutiae of their welcome into China, rather than their precise route,
perhaps because the Imperial escort sent from Beijing, who took them firmly in
78 Baddeley, II, 226.
79 Avril, 87, 142, 150. Russko-kitaiskie otnosheniya, I, 312.
80 Bykov, 76,79. According to Bykov, who advised the Russian army in 1875, the distance between
Bukhara and Samarqand was between 234.5 and 236.5 versts, i.e. between 249.9 and 252 km, and
he estimated that about 20 versts (21.3 km) could be covered daily.
81 Jenkinson, 473. Russko-kitaiskie otnosheniya,I,414.

82 Avril, 142, 135. Anon., Beschreibung, 21.
408

Trade routes

charge at the frontier, allowed them very little time to make the necessary enquiries.
One route, which is described by Maksimko Bykov, the Cossack servant of a
Bukharan from Tomsk, started at Tara and apparently took them just over 31/2
months in 1689.83 They went up the Irtysh to Lake Yamysh, 4 weeks away, then
across the steppes via the Abakan river reaching the Imil (Ilim?) river and the
camping-grounds of the Sungar Galdan in 20 days, and finally to China (presumably
via Irkutsk) where they arrived 2 months later. They returned a similar way but this
time they seem to have missed out Tara and to have gone through the Qirghiz
encampments to Tomsk where they finally arrived 3!/2 months after leaving China.*4
Several other routes were mentioned to Avril but his account of them is very
imprecise. The first went from Tobol'sk upstream along the Irtysh, then to some
lakes ‘near the Irtick’ (probably Lake Yamysh) and across Qalmaq and Mongol

territory to ‘Kokutan’.®8> The second route, which was apparently most favoured by
traders as being by far the quickest, also started in Tobol'sk but went down the Irtysh
and along the river Ob', continuing to the Yenisei either by boat or sledge, according
to the wind. From Yeniseisk merchants went by boat along the Tonguska and Angara
rivers to Lake Baikal and then across the lake, which always took 7 to 8 days because
of raging winds. After crossing Lake Baikal merchants had the option of following
the Selenga to Selenginsk, or going overland by dromedaries and mules, which took
15 days to China. The third route mentioned to Avril went to Nerchinsk, then
continued eastwards via the Amur, and was said to be both safe and short. Finally
travellers along the fourth route were said to pass Lake Dalai (possibly the Hulun Chi,
due south of Nerchinsk) and subsequently a number of silver and lead mines where
they were given ox-drawn wagons and permitted to join the thrice-yearly convoys

which set off from there for Beijing.®®
Avril's informants failed to mention the first town which travellers from Siberia
encountered on entering China. This was the town sometimes called Kapka,
Sifenkun, or Hya pu, but more generally known as Kalgan, after the Mongol name

for the Great Wall which was nearby.®7
According to Gerbillon who went into “Tartary’ (Mongol-held land) on his way to
Nerchinsk in 1688 in order to take part in the negotiations which led to the RussoChinese treaty of peace of 1689, the city of Hya pu was situated half a league from
the Great Wall. It was a large town and a busy trade centre, visited by the Uzbek
Tartars and the merchants from Persia. Gerbillon got there from Beijing in the southeast via the city of Swen (Siian hwa), and Spatharii reached it from the north-east.
Spatharii's detailed account of his journey from Tobol'sk to China shows that he
took what was in effect a combination of Avril's second and third routes and that he
covered a distance of some 4,500 miles (7,200 km). He followed the river Ob' past
Surgut and Narym, went along the Ket' to Yeniseisk, and sailed along the Tonguska
and Angara to Ilimsk and Irkutsk. He did not cross Lake Baikal, however, but went
overland to Selenginsk and Nerchinsk, then due south towards the river Argun, east

83 If he had gone there from Tobol’sk he would have taken 4 months in the winter and 4 months 11
days in the summer.
84 Pamyatniki Sibirskoi istorii, I, 119.
85 This may have been the route followed by the Cossack mentioned above.

86 Avril 142-3.
87 Russko-kitaiskie

otnosheniya,

1, 175, 366, 549n.47, 561 nn.30, 32. Du Halde, IV, 87, 96.

Kalgan is entered on the Reader's Atlas map as modern Chiangkiakow.

409

Bukharan

trade

to the river Naun (Nun) and south-west from there to Kalgan.88 He took a whole year
to complete the journey, but this was because he travelled in style and needed a large
number of boats which were not always available. Lengthy stops were also made to
enable his staff to survey the region, for they were expected to submit a detailed
report to the Tsar of likely problems, whether due to nature, or to man, so that a
definitive route could be planned for the future. But according to Van Klenk's
informants this route could be covered in 5!/2 months.8?
A rather different route was followed by Seitkul Ablin in 1672 and Baikov in
1654. Like Maksimko Bykov, the servant from Tomsk mentioned above, they
followed the Irtysh to Lake Yamysh. From there, instead of going due east as he did,
they continued southwards beyond Lake Zaysan and only then did they turn
eastwards towards the Mongol camping-grounds and the Selenga to reach the Chinese

frontier at Kokotan.%°
Finally there may have been another route to China via India which started in
Astrakhan and probably went through Iran. Avril was told that it was occasionally
used by the Tatars of Astrakhan and Bukhara who made sure, on such occasions, that

they joined a large caravan, for there were large numbers of robbers and many deserts

to cross on the way.?!

VIII

Routes to the Qazaqs, Noghays, Qalmaq, Qirghiz,
Mongols

Although all these peoples were mainly nomads, they also took some interest in
agriculture. They moved their camps seasonally within fairly defined territories, and
their khans, Kuntaidzhis and Altan khans often chose to spend the year in a particular
area, either near or within a town or settlement.
In the period with which we are concerned the Qazaq presence was generally felt
in an area extending from the Irgiz and Syr-Darya in the west to the Balkhash in the
east, and from Tashkent in the south to the higher reaches of the Ishim in the north,

the Qazaq ruler tending to reside either in Tashkent or in Turkestan. Bukharan traders
will have traded with the Qazaqs in the Syr-Darya towns and on their way to Siberia,
Lake Yamysh or Ufa. They may even have travelled to the rivers Chu and Talas, or to

lake Balkhash for that purpose.92
As for the Noghay camping-grounds and settlements, they were generally visited
by Bukharan merchants on their way to and from Muscovy and Siberia. The large
settlements around Saraichik on the Ural river and those along the Volga between
Astrakhan and Kazan' belonged to the Big Horde. In 1608 the seat of their chief
Ishterek was situated near Tsaritsyn. In 1616 the Big Horde fled across the Volga to
escape the Qalmaq, but they were back on the right bank of the river less than three
88 Russko-kitaiskie otnosheniya, 1, 348-66. This route is indicated on the map as the route from
Tobol'sk via Surgut and Ilimsk.

89 Van Klenk, 340-1.

90 Russko-kitaiskie otnosheniya, 1, 169-75, 288-91, 545-9, 557-8.
91 Avril, 142, 87, 86. It is not clear whether this is a different route from the one via Kabul and

Kashmir which a more optimistic informant described as quite safe, adding that the deserts
encountered on the way were just as easy to cross as those of Iran and Turkey.

92 See maps to Muscovy and China for this section and the map appended to Materialy po istorii
Kazakhshkoi SSR. See also Pishchulina, "Prisyrdar'iiskie goroda"; Materialy po istorii russkomongol'skikh otnoshenii, Il, 230; Materialy, 294; Mirza Amin, 128b; and D.A.J., X, 378.

410

Trade routes

years later. They do not appear to have joined the Noghays of the Little Horde whose
settlements in the Caucasus may have been visited by Bukharan merchants on their
way to Turkey. As for the Shikhmamaev Horde (possibly named after a certain
Shaikh Muhammad or Shaikh Mamai) who temporarily sheltered ‘Abdallah's enemy
Baba Sultan in the 1560s, they camped in southern Siberia, north of the Ulugh Taq,
so it will not have been difficult for Bukharans to trade with them near the river

Turgai on their way to Tobol'sk.
The Qalmaq were more widely dispersed than the Noghay Hordes, but some of
them could easily be visited by Bukharan merchants making for Muscovy and
Siberia.
They would have encountered the Torgouts and Derbets when travelling overland
to Astrakhan, Samara and Siberia. The Torgouts, who camped between Tara and the
salt lake of Yamysh in the early seventeenth century, tended after 1630 to control the
area between the Emba and the Volga, as well as the route from Khiva to the Emba. It
was in order to ‘clear (them from) the route’ between the khanate and Muscovy that
Nadir Muhammad suggested a joint expedition to the Tsar in 1639, but they were still
there nearly 40 years later, for Daudov wrote that he needed the Torgout Ayuka's
protection in order to get safely from Khiva to the Yaik.94 Contact with the Torgouts
and Derbets was even easier when they camped, as they did occasionally, in the Qara
Qum. At different times they could also be visited by merchants travelling to Ufa,%
or making their way towards Tara and Tobol'sk. Thus in the 1630s when the Derbet
Kuisha was camping in the Tarbagatai mountains south of Lake Zaysan the Bukharan
envoy, Kazi Kaziev, called to see him en route for Tara. And lively trade with the
Derbets continued during the 1640s when Daichin was said to be camping nearly two

months away from Bukhara.%°
The Khoshout camping-grounds, generally situated along the upper reaches of the
Irtysh and near Lake Zaysan, were accessible for Bukharans travelling to Yamysh.
When they moved, as they did occasionally, near the rivers Vagai and Volga, they
were still quite accessible, and when they camped on the main route to China as in
1674 they were within 10 days from Bukhara. Trade of a sort may have also taken
place on the way to the Sary Su in 1658 when the Khoshout chief, Galdan, and his

army were near the river Talas.9”
The main sphere of Sungar activity stretched from the Altai to beyond Lake Baikal
and down the Irtysh at least as far as Lake Yamysh.98 Bukharans would therefore
have been able to trade with them when travelling between China and Siberia, or
between Bukhara and Siberia. They may also have visited the major settlement of
Kubak-Sary/Kubak Saur, somewhere between Lake Yamysh and the Ob', which was
93 Geraklitov, 105-6. Gnevushev,
Hafiz Tanish, 175b.

193. Novosel'skii, 138. Bogoyavlenskii, "Materialy", 75, 77.

94 Bogoyavlenskii, "Materialy", 67, 68-70. Materialy, 220, 154, 227.
95 Bogoyavlenskii, "Materialy", 77. Materialy po istorii russko-mongol'skikh otnoshenii, 1, 135;

Il, 179.

96 Ibid., II, 27, 179, 229-30.
97 Materialy po istorii russko-mongol'skikh otnoshenii, II, 401. Russko-kitaiskie otnosheniya, |,

289, 312, 543. Lipinskii, 29. Kalmytskie istoriko-literaturnye pamyatniki, 84.
98 Mahmiid b. Wali, More tain, 16, wrote that there were Qalmaq, Qirghiz and Qazaq settlements
near the former town of Almalyk in about 1640. Pamyatniki Sibirskoi istorii, 119. In 1701 the
‘Boshtukhan’ Galdan was said to be camping 20 days from Lake Yamysh and two months from
China.

411

Bukharan trade
founded in about 1636-8 by the overall ruler of all the Qalmaq, the Kuntaidzhi Batur.

In the 1680s they may well have traded with the Sungars in the towns of the SyrDarya after they were conquered by Batur's successor, Galdan. The merchants of the
khanate would have certainly encountered the Sungars at the yearly fair held at
Yamysh, and there were some Bukharans who lived with the Sungars acted as their

Princes' official traders.??
The Qirghiz camping-grounds in the T'ien Shan could be visited by Bukharans
travelling to Kashghariya. Those in the Yenisei were accessible to merchants
travelling from Siberia to China,!© as were the encampments of the eastern Mongols,
which extended from the Abakan river in the Altai to the frontiers of China. But the
merchants of the khanate probably preferred to trade with the Mongols whose
encampments were situated to the west of Lake Baikal, because those who lived on
the other side of this lake, i.e., the Khalkas, were particularly active and aggressive.
In any case the western Mongols’ chief, the Altan Khan, had his seat at Upsa Nor
south of the Abakan river, and this was far more convenient for the Bukharans.1°!

Routes to Turkey

Ottoman Turkey was reached by a variety of ill-defined routes. Bukharan merchants
travelled there via Astrakhan before 1568. A more direct route lay through
Khwarazm, then across the Caspian to Baku and overland through the Caucasus, but
this could only be used in times of peace, when the khans were on good terms with
the rulers of Khwarazm and Iran. There was also a route through Khurasan and Iran,
and a long and circuitous, but far safer route through Gujarat and Arabia, which was
apparently used by pilgrims and which, according to Akbar, was particularly

successful after Gujarat fell to his armies in 1573.102

99 Pelliot, 26. Rumyantsev 409. Bogoyavlenskii, "Materialy", 63. Materialy po istorii russkomongol'skikh otnoshenii, Il, 194, 151, 416. Russko-kitaiskie otnosheniya, I, 548.

100 Bartol'd, Sochineniya, Il, 511, 520, 524.
101 Chimitdorzhiev, Vzaimootnosheniya, 71, 75-86.

102 pee Narody, 251-2. Abt’1-Ghazi, tr. 274-5, text 257. Pamyatniki, XX, 106. Bhagchand
Ta-b.

412

2
The khans' contribution

Before studying each khan's contribution to the trade of the khanate it is worth
considering the specific problems met by foreign traders as well as the problems
which faced local merchants.
A number of caravanserais were available for foreign merchants. Although no
comprehensive list is available, it is known that there was one for Khwarazmian
merchants in Bukhara, called the Urganji caravanserai, in which eighty traders were
staying in 1694 when Anusha attacked the khanate.! Two more, which were built by
the Juibari shaikhs, accommodated the merchants from Iran and the Arab countries.
Another was reserved for Indians, and there was probably a special one allocated to
Muscovite merchants, for they are known to have travelled to Bukhara and Balkh in
groups of 40-50 in the 1640s and to have stayed there 2 to 3 years at a time.”
From the documents available it seems that these caravanserais generally had an
inner courtyard and gates flanked by a portico, with shops in the courtyard and also
sometimes along the perimeter wall. They might be made of burnt brick, like the
Kav/Gav/Gau Kashan caravanserai which Khwajah Sa‘d Juibari acquired in 1570.
They were probably made secure at night, as were the separate shopping areas called
tim, and merchants were presumably expected to pay for their accommodation in
accordance with the practice in Iran and other eastern countries.? Stables were
provided for horses and camels either within the same caravanserai as their owners, if
it was large enough, or else outside the town. At the Samarqand caravanserai which
is described in a deed of sale of 1629 and which was a two-storey building, both
summer and winter stalls were provided for the merchants’ pack-animals.*
With regard to trade practices in the khanate, it is not clear from Jenkinson's
evidence whether the 10 per cent sales tax charged to local craftsmen and merchants
was also applicable to foreign merchants, but from his experience it is obvious that
obtaining prompt cash payment for goods was not easy. Although he sold his goods
to no less a person than ‘Abdallah II, the Englishman found that he was ‘forced to

1 Mirza Amin, 145a.
2 Mukminova,

Ocherki,

136. Mukminova, Sotsial’naya

diferentsiatsiya, 114. Materialy,

177.

D.A.1., X, 383. From the deposition of the Muscovite envoys to Tauka who visited Bukhara, it
seems that there may have been a Noghay caravanserai in this town in 1695. Meyendorff, Voyage,
190 and ff., says there were two Urgenchi, one Hindu and one Noghay caravanserai in Bukhara in
1819.
3 Iz arkhiva, nos. 1, 3, 264, 306. Egani, "Regesty 1976-7/1984", 109-110. Volovnikov, 99. On the

caravanserais in Iran and India see Chardin, Voyages, I, 207, and Manucci, A Pepys, 34.
4 Egani, "Regesty 1976-7/1984", 109-110. According to Mukminova (Sotsial'naya diferentsiatsiya,
114) only the large caravanserais were built on two floors.

Bukharan trade

rebate part, and to take wares as payment for the rest contrary to (his) expectations’.
The Muscovite merchant, Ivan Sorokin, also had serious difficulties in this respect. In
fact he had to spend over two years in Bukhara in order to collect his outstanding
debts.5 Another major problem was a practice described by the Tsar's envoy in the
early eighteenth century - merchants might purchase a number of items, then change
their minds and return them to the seller some months later, or even three years later.®
In addition to this a certain amount of discrimination based on religion was to be
expected. Non-Sunni merchants might be penalized and made to pay larger dues on
their transactions, as in the following centuries, and some problems were bound to
arise owing to the fierce religious zeal of the population. Chardin was told in 1674
that ‘la Tartarie était en réputation de maltraiter les Etrangers, surtout ceux qui
n'étoient pas de la Religion du Pais’. Indeed it was generally believed in Iran that
local sectarianism and xenophobia were responsible for the murder of a number of
Armenian merchants who had gone to Balkh a few years earlier, on the strength of a
laisser-passer from the local Prince. However, the khans and their ambassadors did
their best to encourage foreigners to trade in the khanate. The Balkh ambassador not
only assured Chardin that Subhan Quli would treat him well and would buy large
quantities of goods from him, he was actually prepared to execute a deed in Isfahan
guaranteeing the Frenchman, his servants and his possessions ‘pour autant que je le
désirerais’. Similarly, in most of their letters to the Tsars the khans offered trade
advantages to Muscovite merchants.
Indian traders living in the khanate certainly found that they could rely on the
khan's protection. This proved to be so on one occasion when they were robbed by a
lovelorn youth who wanted to send a present to his beloved. When the Indians
appealed to him, Imam Quli at once saw to it that the young man was found and the
jewels in question returned. The robber himself, however, was not punished, because
the khan sympathised with him. He was given a present for his beloved, and both of

them were taken into the khan's employment.’
Trade within the khanate was very tightly regulated. Sales, purchases and
agreements about debts were described in detail and registered before the qadi in front
of numerous witnesses,® and local merchants were subjected to a multitude of taxes.
The three major taxes were the tamgha, the baj and the zakat. The tamgha had two
rather distinct applications. It was paid on sales, and also as a sort of import tax at the
frontiers of the khanate. Its rate may have been 10 per cent of the value of goods like
the sales tax which Jenkinson encountered in 1558.9 Baj was an internal transport tax
of 2 per cent payable even when towns were situated as near to each other as Akhsiket
and Andijan. The exact rate of the zakat is not known, but it was meant to be one
fortieth part (i.e. 2.5%) of the value of any merchandise and the pious khans are
likely to have kept to the letter of the law and to have insisted that this amount be
collected from traders for distribution to the poor.!°
5 Jenkinson, "The voyage", 470-1. TsSGADA, fond 109, op.1, 1643 no.1, listy 1-6.
6 Popov, 302.
7 Chardin, Voyages, II, 121. Muhammad Yisuf Munshi, 251b-2b.

8 Iz arkhiv, pass. Fitrat, Kaziiskie dokumenty, pass. Chekhovich, Bukharskie dokumenty, pass.
2 Mukminova,

Ocherki, 207-9. Davidovich, "Materialy dlya kharakteristiki", 42, thinks that the

tamgha and the import tax were two different taxes.

10 Mukminova, Ocherki, 210-1. Akhmedov, Istoriya, 143. Abdurraimov, Ocherki, Il, 181, 178,
equates baj and tamgha. As for the zakat, he says that its rate was higher than the one-fortieth
allowed and that the money collected was sometimes used for paying the khan's fighting men.

414

The khans' contribution

Other taxes were paid on crossing a river,!! on the empty containers in which
goods were or would be transported, and on the space which the goods themselves
occupied in the market.!? Gifts in return for services (pishkash, saughdat,
khedmatana, salam) were expected by officials, and even the khan expected a
pishkash if he received a merchant at Court.!3 In addition to these individual taxes
and payments the trading community as a whole had to provide foreign ambassadors
with food supplies during their first three days in the capital. Furthermore, in
accordance with the ulagh corvée Bukharan ambassadors and their suites were entitled
to take horses and asses from traders and others before they left Bukhara on official
duty. Finally, unless they had been specifically exempted, merchants would have
been liable to numerous taxes levied for the benefit of the army and administrative
personnel, and also to the strictly enforced corvées which ensured the essential repair
of roads, canals, bridges and town walls.!4
Taxes and corvées were not the only problems which merchants had to face.
When Jenkinson visited Bukhara, which was already under the control of Iskandar
and ‘Abdallah II in 1558, he noted that if ‘the king’ was ‘short of money’ he sent
‘officers to take the Merchants’ wares to pay his debts’, an unpleasant practice which
was still extant under Nadir Muhammad. The ruler of the khanate also had first choice
of all valuable manufactured goods sold in the khanate according to Mukminova. That
meant that none could be sold until his agents had looked them over and put aside

those which he would later buy at his own price.!5
A far worse problem was the constant change in the value of silver. Jenkinson
reported with disapproval and no doubt with an element of exaggeration, that when he
was there the value went ‘up and down every other month, even twice a month’, and
he explained that ‘the king doesn't care as he is not likely to reign more than 2-3 years
before being slain or driven away’.!© Jenkinson was probably referring to the
practice, prevalent throughout the khanate, of reducing the value of existing coins by
one-tenth as soon as a new issue was minted. This no doubt enriched the authorities,
for they could make one-tenth clear profit by accepting ‘old’ coins at the lower value
and then re-issuing them as new, but it was detrimental to merchants and indeed
curtailed their activities, for they were anxious not to hold cash for fear that it might
lose part of its value.
Another serious problem was the fact that the coins minted in different towns
were not interchangeable, an out-of-town silver tanga being either unacceptable or
only acceptable at an articifially lower rate. Furthermore, the ratio between the silver
tanga and the copper dinar varied, so that before accepting payment for any
transaction it was preferable to stipulate the value and type of the coin required from

allowed and that the money collected was sometimes used for paying the khan's fighting men.

11 §4 pili.
12 pal-i takhti jai.
13 In 1819 Meyendorff was shocked by the general cupidity of officials and said that all of them,

beginning with the khan himself, preferred money to all other kinds of presents. Meyendorff, 229-

30.
14 Abdurraimov,

Ocherki, Il, 182-205. "Nakaz", 46. Mukminova,

Istoriya, 144.

15 Jenkinson, "The Voyage", 471. TSGADA,

Ocherki, 211-3. Akhmedov,
.

fond 134, op.1, 1641 no.2, list 144. Mukminova,

Ocherki, 213-4.

16 Jenkinson, "The Voyage", 471.

415

Bukharan trade

the purchaser. Thus when the Juibari shaikhs agreed to purchase an enormous
number of properties in the 1550s and 1560s the contracts stated, not only that the
agreed price would be paid in new tanga, i.e., the tanga in current use, but also that
the tanga in question should be of pure silver. It was even thought necessary, on
occasion, to specify that it should weigh ‘a new mithqdl’’, i.c., 4.8 grammes.!7
Such was the state of affairs when ‘Abdallah b. Iskandar conquered Bukhara, and
he made it his business to try and remedy it, for he was very conscious of the
importance of trade and equally determined to develop it. He did so in several ways:
he made sweeping changes to the coinage of Bukhara and the khanate, he provided
numerous buildings for the use of traders, and he interceded on their behalf with the
Tsars to ensure that they were granted freedom of movement in Muscovy.
The first of his changes to the coinage was introduced during his father's reign,
when ‘Abdallah had some gold coins struck which are thought to have been
distributed as rewards, or else used for making major payments. He fixed their
weight at one mithqal, or half a mithq4l, insisted on a strict control of their weight and
purity, and severely fined those guilty of contravening the new rules, even if they had
merely added base metal to the stipulated weight of the coins.
More important reforms to the coinage syStem were introduced after ‘Abdallah
formally succeeded to the throne in 1583. In order to strengthen his hold on the
khanate while also encouraging trade ‘Abdallah reduced the number of mints,
established a uniform type of silver coin no longer subject to constant depreciation,
and standardised the value of the tanga.
To take first the reduction in the money supply, it is generally agreed that new
mints appeared in Khurasan and that ‘Abdallah issued fewer coins than his father.
The mint in Herat probably functioned from 1588 until ‘Abdallah's death in 1598,
although the coins which have been identified were only issued during a period of 5
to 6 years, between 999 and 1004 (1590-1 to 1595-6). There was also a mint at

Mashahd of which a single coin, dated 1003/1594-S, is held in the Hermitage. In Ma
wara’ al-nahr proper the number of mints permitted appears to have been reduced, for
no coins struck in Akhsi, Andijan or Yassy/Turkestan have been found so far.
Samarqand and Tashkent, however, continued to strike coins.
Davidovich originally believed that coining was abolished in Samarqand as a
political measure and that only two coins were known for Tashkent, but all this has
been invalidated by Lowick's work, and her own more recent research. Although
Lowick wrote that very little coining took place in either of these towns, he was able
to list more than one coin struck in Samargand in the 990s, i.e. after the beginning of
‘Abdallah's personal reign. He also noted that coins were issued in Tashkent in all but
three years of the reign, with no fewer than seven types recorded for 999/1590-1.
Davidovich herself lists as many as four other types of coins for Samarqand and four
more for Tashkent in the comprehensive review of Shaibanid coins which she

published in 1992.18
The abolition of minting at Akhsi and Andijan and the apparent reduction in the
output of the Samargqand mint may have been intended as a punishment for the
support which these towns had given to Jawanmard ‘Ali, Baza Khwar, Baba Sultan
17 Iz arkhiv, pass. Davidovich, "Dve denezhnye reformy", 125, 126, 118. The new mithqal
weighing 4.8 grammes was introduced in 921-3/1515-7 by Kichkinchi. It replaced the earlier
mithqal of 5.2 gr. and was equal to 20 copper dinars. Davidovich, "Nekotorye cherti", 60.

18 Davidovich, "Dve denezhnye reformy", 120-2, 128, 134. Lowick, "Shaybanid Silver Coins", 305,
325-6. Lane-Poole, 61. Davidovich, Korpus, 238-43, 348, 351-4.

416

The khans' contribution

and ‘Abdallah's other rivals. Moreover, by removing or limiting their capacity to
mint, “Abdallah was stressing their subservience to Bukhara and depriving potential
rivals of an effective way of demonstrating their independence. An exception was
made in the case of Tashkent, perhaps because, like Herat and Balkh, it was too far
away to be easily supplied with coins from the capital, and also because ‘Abdallah did
not want to hamper its trade. Balkh had an additional claim because, from 1582, it

was the seat of the heir to the throne. However, it is interesting to note that by far the
greater number of the coins found bearing ‘Abdallah's name were minted in
Bukhara.!9
‘Abdallah's second reform, which Davidovich attributes to the second year of his

reign, i.e. 1584, introduced a new concept by insisting that coins of identical pattern
and shape could be minted in successive years and yet retain their value. This measure
not only helped traders, it also served to increase ‘Abdallah's control over the
economic life of the khanate. The fact that standardised coins were issued year after
year not only in Bukhara, but also in Balkh, Herat and Tashkent, simplified the work
of the various mints. Fewer specialists were needed in order to devise and check new
types of coins, the same dies could be used time and again, and fraud was easier to
detect and eliminate. The advantages of a stable currency had to be balanced against
the resulting loss of benefit to the Treasury, for if old coins could no longer be
distinguished from new ones, they could no longer be made to lose part of their value
‘by way of royal exploitation’. But ‘Abdallah was prepared to accept this in order to
stimulate trade. The establishment of a uniform system of currency certainly gave
merchants a greater feeling of security and enabled them to trade on a larger scale.

And they were bound to be grateful and loyal to him as a result.2°
However, although this must have been what ‘Abdallah intended and the new

system of coinage was certainly enforced throughout his reign, his subjects were
reluctant to believe that an ‘old’ coin could retain its full value even after a new issue
had been struck. Two legal documents summarised by Egani and Chekhovich make it
clear that coins of different values continued to circulate in the khanate, and that the
concept of ‘old’ coins worth 90 per cent of the value of new coins did not disappear
altogether. In the first document, dated 999/1590, craftsmen who had failed to deliver
the agreed quantity of carded cotton were made to return the subsidy allowed to them,
which was 60 tanga of inferior quality, worth 6/10 or ‘short of 8 nukhud’ (about 1.6
gr.) in weight of silver.2! The second document, dated 1597, refers to the purchase
by Hasan Khwajah Juibari of two plots of land and a mill near Bukhara. The agreed
price was 1,500 tanga in ‘old’ coins, and the value of these ‘old’ coins is stipulated in
the contract as being nine-tenths (or 90 per cent of the value of a new coin).”2
If ‘Abdallah had totally abolished his predecessors’ nefarious practice of declaring
even their own previous issues ‘old’, then both documents must have referred, not to
19 Davidovich, 342-52, lists 166 silver coins clearly inscribed with the name of Bukhara, as against
44 for Balkh, 26 for Samarqand, 6 for Tashkent, 16 or 17 for Herat and one for Mashhad.
20 Davidovich, "Dve denezhnye reformy", 134.

21 Egani, “Reestry 1974/1981", 51. This would mean short of 1.6 gr. of silver, if we accept
Davidovich's calculations, for she found evidence to suggest (Istoriya, 301, 93-94) that 2 nukhud
equalled half a dang and since 1 dang equalled 1/6 mithq§l, i.e., 0.8 gr, she deduces that one

nukhad weighed exactly 0.2 gr. However, it seems that the weight of a nukhud was not fixed for,
although the 6/10 tanga (one in which the silver content was 60%) was said to be ‘short of 8

nukhud’ in 1590, it was taken to be ‘short of up to 10 nukhud’ in a deed of sale registered in
1657. Chekhovich, Dokumenty, 47-55.

22 Egani, "Regesty, 1976-7/1984", 107-8.
417

Bukharan trade

coins struck a few months or a year before the issues of 1590 and 1597, but to coins
struck before 1584. In that case, to take the transaction involving Hasan Khwajah, the
Jaibari shaikh was able to pay with coins accumulated over many years, and it is
interesting to note that 13 years after ‘Abdallah's introduction of the uniform tanga
weighing 4.8 grammes his subjects were still legally permitted to use an earlier type
of tanga. ‘Abdallah would thus appear to have been accommodating about the use of
the new tanga and to have permitted his subjects, and in particular his traders, to use
up their stores of old coins. At the same time, however, he created a strong and stable
new currency on which they could rely and which would enable them to gain further
wealth for themselves and for the khanate.
‘Abdallah's third and very useful reform was to equate the new tanga with exactly
30 copper dinars, a new ratio between the silver and copper currencies which was
retained by subsequent rulers of the khanate. This reform was necessary because,
although Kichkinchi Khan had established the tanga as equal to 20 copper dinars in
1515, the ratio between the two had been unstable, varying between 20 and 40 dinars
to the tanga. ‘Abdallah chose a low rate of exchange for the tanga because this was in
line with the decline in the silver reserves of the khanate since Kuchkunchi's day.
This being more realistic and fairer, ‘Abdallah hoped that his reform would be easy to
enforce and that the khanate would acquire a better and more stable foundation for its
trade.23
With this in mind ‘Abdallah attempted to increase the khanate's, or rather his
own, reserves of silver. Thus in 1589 his ambassador, Muhammad

‘Ali, asked Tsar

Fedor for permission to take 1,000 silver roubles back to his master. He explained
that these were needed by ‘Abdallah ‘for silver dishes’, an ambiguous expression
which may have meant that ‘Abdallah needed them in order to purchase silver dishes,
or else that he needed them as raw material for the production of silver dishes.
Whether ‘Abdallah wanted such dishes as an outward expression of his growing
power, or in fact needed the silver coins in order to recoup the expenses incurred
during the campaign to Herat, he must have been gratified when his request was

granted.?4
“Abdallah also helped traders by providing them with numerous caravanserais,
tim, bridges and cool resting-places (sardaba) on the major caravan routes, the

sardaba being a well-ventilated structure built over a water-cistern. The traders are
sure to have benefited from the long period of internal peace in his reign, and from the
development of agriculture, which he encouraged by settling people in derelict areas
and by building dams and canals that made additional water available for irrigation.25
Muhammad Yusuf Munshi's claim that ‘Abdallah built 1,001 fortified inns (ribat) and
sardaba is no doubt exaggerated, but the provision of such facilities appears to have

?3 Davidovich, "Dve denezhnye reformy", 135-6. Eadem, "Nekotorye cherti", 60. For a tanga equal
to 30 dinars in 1650 see Davidovich, Dokumenty, 37.
24 Materialy,

100, 105.

25 See Hafiz Tanish, 197b, 223a, for the measures taken by ‘Abdallah to encourage agriculture in

Badakhshan and near Khujand. See Istoriya

Uzbekskoi

SSR, 1, 546, for the dam built by

“Abdallah to regulate the water coming to Aqtipa. Mukminova (Sotsial'naya diferentsiastiya,
24-25, 19), however, takes a dim view of ‘Abdallah's canal building, insisting that it was achieved
by means of a most burdensome corvée which ruined the peasant population, as they were unable
to look after their own crops while employed on this compulsory and unpaid task. She also points
out that “Abdallah destroyed the canal at Marw, which brought poverty to that area for at least

seven years.

418

The khans' contribution

spread as far as Kashghariya and Khurasan. Thus a fort attributed to ‘Abdallah still
exists in Marw and in the early nineteenth century Mir ‘Izzat Ullah saw the remains of
another building on the route between Yarkand and Kashghar. Within the khanate it is
interesting to note that “Abdallah is credited with buiding as many as three ribat
between Bukhara and Samarqand, and more than one caravanserai on the routes that
linked Qarshi with Samargand and with Bukhara.26
During the troubled period that followed ‘Abdallah's and his son's death trade
was seriously disrupted. Nothing seems to have been done to help traders, and indeed
diplomatic and trading contact with the outside world was lost until Baqi Muhammad
sent ambassador Adnash to Moscow in 1600. Although no details are known about
this embassy, it seems likely that Adnash was sent on a trade mission, for Baqi
Muhammad was very conscious of the importance of commerce for the khanate. He
even approached the governors of Khurasan some time after Shah ‘Abbas's siege of

Balkh, in order to re-establish friendly relations for the benefit of merchants.27 Baqi
Muhammad's interest in trade did not, however, override his own personal interests.
He returned to the practice of coining repeatedly in Bukhara, Samargand, Balkh and
Tashkent, no doubt in order to try and increase the resources of a Treasury depleted
by several wars. In less than four years he had as many as 7 varieties of coins issued
in his father's name and 10 coined in his own name, of which three types were struck

in Bukhara alone.8
Baqi Muhammad's brother and successor does not appear to have been interested
in trade. On the contrary, Wali Muhammad was censured for squandering vast sums
of money on the poor and on his supporters. His attempts at cowing his nephews into
submission impoverished the country, as did his high-handed attitude to his subjects,
whose possessions he appropriated without any thought of paying for them.
Imam Quli had a very different approach to that of his uncle. He not only
established trading contact with Muscovy at the official level, he also sent Adam Bik
to Moscow in 1619 to ask for the free movement of merchants between the two
countries. One of the various kupchina (trading agents) sent during his reign, Hajji
Ata Quli, took a consignment worth 4,891 roubles to Yaroslavl' in 1633, consisting

of over 6,000 pieces of zenden’, a variety of other cotton materials and some 1,000 Ib
of raw silk, which he was to barter for supplies required by the khan. Another,
Behbad, took 3,788 roubles' worth of merchandise to Astrakhan in 1635, and in

1640 Khozziyan (Hajji Jan?) was sent to Tobol’sk with 100 camels laden with official
goods. Within the khanate Imam Quli helped agriculture by building canals. He also
hired out pack-horses to traders, a measure which may have been beneficial to them
and which Muhammad Yisuf Munshi takes as proof of the khan's good-nature and
accessibility. In fact it was just one of the expedients which Imam Quli, chronically
short of money, resorted to in order to raise funds for his Treasury, most of which

were detrimental to his subjects.??
One expedient, which would ultimately cause a serious decrease in revenue, and
which we shall call the one-third rule, related to the sale of Crown land. This was a
26 Hajji Mir, 127a. Volovnikov, 97. Istoriya Tadzhikskogo naroda, Il, i, 404-5. Muhammad Yusuf
Munshi, 234b-5a. Klaproth, "Voyage dans ]'Asie", 35, 48, 49, 166. Evarnitskii, 37. Khanykov,
Opisanie, 110. Kastan'e, "Arkheologicheskie razvedki", 30.
27 Opisi tsarskogo arkhiva, 93. Iskandar Beg, 632.

28 Davidovich, Istoriya, 12, 14-15, 243.
29 Khilkov, 426. Materialy, 141, 192, 363. Muhammad Yusuf Munshi, 250b.
419

Bukharan trade

complicated procedure. The khan would sell a plot of Crown land (mamlakat-i
padshahi, or amlak) to one of his subjects. This sale, duly executed in front of the
qadi, changed the legal status of the plot. It became milk or milk-i kharaj land and as
such it yielded a land tax (kharaj) of three-tenths of the harvest, in kind, to be

delivered yearly by the tenant and shared between the Crown, which kept two-thirds
of this, and the landlord who took the remaining one-third. Immediately after the sale
of the land a second deal was entered into. The new owner would give two-thirds of
the plot back to the Crown, in return for which the Crown would totally renounce its
rights on the remaining one-third. This became known as milk-i hurr i khalis (‘free
and pure, or white’). It was exempt from all government taxes, although certain
corvées might still be required by the government from the tenants or occupiers,3°
and the full value of the khardj (three-tenths of the harvest) was allotted, from then on

and in perpetuity, to the new owner and his descendants who would also be entitled
to collect and retain for themselves any other government taxes that would normally
be charged to the peasants working the land.
Imam Quli seems to have adopted this well-known expedient, already in use in the
area in the late fifteenth century, and probably as early as the eleventh century, in
order to compensate for his inability to pay the wages of officials. Although its net
result was generally to reduce the Crown patrimony as well as the amount of tax
which could be collected by the State, the Crown could also benefit as a result. Thus
in 1630, when a certain Sayyid Mir Muhammad Tahir offered two-thirds of his
property to Imam Quli for the benefit of the Treasury, on his own initiative and in
return for the usual exemptions, the Crown acquired land which it had not owned

earlier.>!
A far more damaging expedient, as far as traders were concerned, was Imam
Quli's constant tampering with the coinage. He did so in two ways. First he increased
his revenue by repeatedly issuing ‘new’ coins and declaring earlier issues ‘old’, i.e.,
less valuable by 10 per cent. These new coins were minted in Bukhara, Balkh,
Samarqand, Hisar and Tashkent. Each issue was made recognizably different from
the others and at least 57 types of coins were struck during his reign. Secondly, and
because he cannot have been satisfied with the income thus generated, Imam Quli
went on to introduce a sizeable quantity of base metal into the silver tanga. The
debased tanga was still artificially equated with 30 dinars, irrespective of its silver
content, the quantity of copper alloy added to it being 20 per cent in 1615 and as
much as 35 per cent some seven years later.
Naturally enough Imam Quli's subjects were reluctant to part with the more
valuable ‘old’ coins in order to acquire coins of a lower intrinsic value. They
continued to use ‘old’ coins for their private transactions, basing themselves on the
silver content of these coins. That this practice was prevalent can be seen from the fact

that 20 years after the beginning of his reign and after at least five new types of coins
had been issued, in which the silver content had oscillated between 65 and 80 per

cent, one of his main supporters, Yalangtush Bi, was able to pay as much as 52,500
tanga in coins ‘of pure silver, old, struck by Imam Quli’, for a piece of land in Shahri sabz. Moreover these coins, which could only have been issued in the first three or
30 Grulev, "Nekotorye...dannye", 76-77. Cleaning the canals was still a requirement in the late 19th
century, and fines were imposed on landowners who failed to send the required number of men to
fulfill this vital communal obligation.

31 Chekhovich, "V. V. Bartol'd", 152-4. Eadem, Dokumenty,
zemel'nyi milk", 46-50.

420

14-23. Davidovich, "Feodal'nyi

The khans' contribution
four years of his reign, were described in the contract as ‘in current use’ 32
But the government found ways of forcing people to acquire at least some of the
‘new’ coins, and apparently used such coins when paying officials and soldiers.33
Taxes, for example, had to be paid in ‘new’ coins, and when ‘old’ coins were
surrendered in exchange, the Treasury made a profit at the expense of the people,
because an ‘old’ coin, whatever its intrinsic value, was always taken at 90 per cent of

the value of a new one.34

Thus the khan not only gave his people poor value by issuing ‘new’ coins of
debased value which they were forced to use, he also acquired valuable silver from
the ‘old’ ones which they surrendered to his Treasury. The ‘old’ coins would later be
melted down and when the silver was re-used, together with base metal, to make the
next batch of ‘new’ coins, the khan made a further profit at his people's expense. No
wonder Khokhlov found in 1622 that Imam Quli was unpopular and that many had
chosen to go and live instead in the province of Balkh, which was capably
administered by Nadir Muhammad, a fact which even the hostile Mughal historian

Lahauri had to admit.35
Nadir Muhammad was not only a capable administrator. He also had a very
positive attitude to trade. Thus he sent an agent to Muscovy with 7,500 roubles'
worth of goods in about 1624, at a time when relations between his brother and the
Tsar were at a very low ebb following Khokhlov's visit. This agent, whose name
was Shah Husain, then settled in Astrakhan where he lived for 15 years with his son,
travelling repeatedly to Kazan’ and Iran to trade. When Shah Husain died near
Saratov his son and heir Khwajah Husain continued to trade on Nadir Muhammad's
behalf until he was killed during a trading expedition in Siberia. As soon as Nadir
Muhammad found out he wrote to the Tsar asking for Khwajah Husain's goods to be
recovered and sent back to the khanate. And his request was entrusted to his first
ambassador to Muscovy, Muhammad Ibrahim, who was himself an experienced
trader and who had been trading with Muscovy well before he was first appointed
ambassador in 1639. A year later Nadir Muhammad wrote to the Tsar to suggest that
they take joint action against the Qalmaq because they were blocking the route
between the two countries and disrupting their mutual trade. He added that his troops
were ready to take action, but this came to nothing. However, he was still ready to
intervene in 1643, for in a letter sent to Moscow with Kuzai Nughai he expressed the
hope that trade between their subjects would continue uninterrupted and become

‘safer than ever’ before.3®
Nadir Muhammad also appears to have had considerable trade links with Iran,
India, China, Turkey and the West even in the days when he was only the ruler of
Balkh. This can be seen from the lists of generous presents which he gave to Imam
Quli and also to his own subjects. These gifts ranged from Iranian silk and horses,
Russian leather and coats of mail, and European cloth and velvets, to Indian nuts and
32 Chekhovich, Dokumenty, 28. Davidovich, Istoriya, 20-30, 56, 92, 125-6, 131. Davidovich,
"Monetnye nakhodki...v 1970", 278.
33 Davidovich, Istoriya, 132. However, in 1622 Khokhlov was told that ‘the khan's men’ were not

paid and therefore expected to be given part of the gifts which they delivered to foreign
ambassadors on the khan's behalf. Khilkov, 403.

34 Davidovich, Istoriya, 97-102, 124-5, 131-4, suggests that ‘new’ coins might have been specially
issued, as in the early eighteenth century, at times when wages had to be paid.

35 Khilkov, 420. Lahauri, II, 542.
36 Materialy, 152, 153-4, 178-9.

421

Bukharan trade

materials. He is said by Muhammad Yasuf Munshi to have had no less than 400
trunks of European orange velvet at the time of his accession to the throne of
Bukhara, and, according to Lahauri, silver and gold objects adorned with precious
stones worth as much as 1,200,000 rupees (and five times as many tanga) were

found among his possessions when he fled Balkh in 1645.37
Nadir Muhammad's attitude to coinage appears to have been healthier than his
brother's. Although he issued 15 types of coins when he was overall ruler of the
khanate, i.e.between 1051/1641 and 1054/1644-5, he seems to have refrained from
debasing their value much further, for the specimens which have been analysed by
Davidovich and which were issued in 1052/1642-3 contain very little more base metal
(0.5 per cent) than those struck by Imam Quli twenty years earlier.
Within the khanate Nadir Muhammad did much to foster agriculture, a policy
which will have ultimately benefited trade. Mahmid b. Wali tells us that before 1641
Nadir Muhammad repaired a canal and had 200 families settled near Qunduz in order
to revitalise a decaying area. He also had special varieties of fruit, aromatic herbs,
flowers and trees planted in Balkh so as to develop the production of fruit and flowers
in that region. He added to the general prosperity of this province by digging canals

for the gardens of his numerous palaces and delegating the various districts under his
care to his sons who pacified them if necessary, and then followed his example by
developing local resources. Furthermore he kept strict control over his sons, changing
over their appanages regularly and dismissing their incompetent or dishonest officials,
thereby ensuring that the territory allotted to each of them was properly
administered.38
There was only one aspect of Nadir Muhammad's behaviour which must have
hampered trade and agriculture. When short of money or presents for use as wages or
rewards he took money from the peasants and rich robes from the merchants, paying
them back some time later, a practice which was disruptive, although not as arbitrary
or despotic as the practices which his uncle, Wali Muhammad, had adopted in his
day.39
Nadir Muhammad's sons did not follow in his footsteps. They did not husband
the resources of the khanate, as their father had done. Instead, they dissipated its
wealth during their respective reigns. At first ‘Abd al-‘Aziz was too occupied fighting
his father and the Mughal army to take much interest in trade. After his father's
abdication his many military expeditions helped to empty his Treasury and to ruin
agricultural production, as no doubt crops were trampled by the various armies and
farmers fled their fields. At this stage he attempted to recoup his losses by making
greater use of the one-third rule with regard to tax exemption, simplifying its
application and obtaining a large personal profit from the transaction. He sold the land
to officials and relatives, received the full price for it, agreed to take back two-thirds
in exchange for exempting the remainder from tax, and all this was done in a single
document, whereas two or three documents may have been needed to achieve the

same result in the days of Imam Quli. Several documents have survived which show

how this was done. And although much was said in them about the strict legality of
37 Mahmiad b. Wali (Ethé), 252b, 254b, 255a, 257a. Muhammad Yasuf Munshi, 259b. Lahauri, II,
540. For the rate of the rupee as equal to 5 tanga see Lahauri, I, i, 465, 468.

38 Davidovich, Istoriya, 31-36, 56, 92. Mahmid b. Wali, More tain, 21, 24, 38, 57, 91. Mahmad
b. Wali (Ethé), 215a-b, 218a-221a, 227a-230a.
39 TsGADA, fond 134, op.1, 1641 no.2, list 144. See further about Wali Muhammad in chapter 5
above.

422

The khans' contribution

the transactions and about the khan's absolute right to dispose of the land in question,
in fact this was not the case, for the land belonged to the State and not to him
personally.4° However, this was a convenient way of replenishing his coffers and
securing the allegiance and gratitude of officials, since the land given to them brought
in a yearly income, was exempt from taxation, and could not be taken away from
them.
This policy cannot have helped the economy of the country. However, ‘Abd al“Aziz was keenly aware of the advantages of foreign trade, and two years after Tsar
Aleksei issued the Novotorgovyi ustav of 1667,4! which put difficulties in the path of
Bukharan and other merchants, he sent the first of many embassies to Muscovy. His
aim was to secure better conditions for Bukharans and to encourage Muscovites to
come and trade in the khanate, and there is no doubt that his ambassadors, Mulla
Farrukh, and later Hajji Farrukh, were well prepared for the task. They ably
answered a variety of questions about the goods available in the khanate, whether
produced locally, or of Indian origin. They kept quiet about ‘Abd al-‘Aziz's
difficulties with his brother, but made a point of stressing that Mughal India and its
commercial potential were within easy reach of the khanate, should Muscovite
merchants wish to travel that way. Mullah Farrukh was particularly successful. He
obtained a major concession from the Tsar, who granted Bukharan merchants the
privilege of trading for money and not only for goods in Muscovite frontier towns,
although this was totally against the spirit of the New Trade Regulation. Hajji
Farrukh, for his part, secured a promise from the Tsar that the late Mulla Farrukh's
possessions would be returned to the khanate and that an ambassador would be sent
to the khanate. He berated the Siberian voevodas for not allowing Bukharan traders
and envoys to go from Tobol'sk to Moscow and asked the Tsar to compel them to cooperate. He also promised that the rulers of Bukhara and Balkh would help the IndoMuscovite trade by providing escorts for the Indian merchants who might come

through on their way to Muscovy.‘
Despite these efforts on behalf of traders, and although ‘Abd al-‘Aziz built a
special market in Samarqand for the sale of sheep, his reign, on the whole, was less
than beneficial to trade. He not only tampered with the coinage, introducing at least 39
types of ‘new’ coins, he also allowed the silver content of the tanga to drop to its
lowest level so far. In August 1656 the level dropped from the 60 per cent recorded
under Nadir Muhammad in 1642 to 35 per cent, and this loss in real value turned out
to be counter-productive, for it affected his own interest as well as that of his
subjects. When he sold some land a year later, he was obliged to ask for coins of a
higher intrinsic value in settlement. Having only just managed to survive the last two
devastating attacks by Abi ’1-Ghazi and being aware that he needed substantial sums
for the army, he specified that payment should be made in ‘old’ silver coins with a
silver content of ‘six-tenths’ also described as ‘short of 10 nukhid’.4? Later in his

40 See Chekhovich, Dokumenty, 14-23, for Imam Quli's use of the two-third rule, and 41-46, 47-55,
56-64, for ‘Abd al-‘Aziz's use of the same rule. See also Chekhovich, "V. V. Bartol'd", 153-4.

41 See further about this in chapters 8 and 14.
42 TsGADA. fond 109, op.1, 1669-75 kn.1, listy 21b-23a, 31b-32b, 45a-46a, 52b, 53b-4b, 108a-b,
111b, 112b-3b. See also chapter 9 above.
43 Deh shesh bedeh nukhad. If Davidovich is right and a nukhid was exactly 0.2 gr, 6/10 meant
‘short of 8 nukhid’, and by equating it to ‘short of 10 nukhud’ ‘Abd al-‘Aziz was indicating that
he was prepared to stretch a point and take coins of slightly lower value. It could be of course that
6/10 was a loose concept meaning ‘short of 8 nukhid’ and also ‘anything between short of 8 and

423

Bukharan trade

reign, no doubt because he realised that coins with a poor silver content were
unpopular, he struck coins of a far higher standard, the issue of 1677 being described
as seven-tenths (70% silver). But he was unable to keep this up. Perhaps as a result
of Subhan Quli's unabated hostility and the serious famine in 1678, he was forced to
coin at an all-time low of 25 per cent in 1680, i-e., in the year preceding his

abdication.“4
Subhan Quli was well aware of the advantages of trade, just as his brother was,
but he did little to help his merchants’ efforts. Trade with Muscovy therefore suffered
during his reign. This was partly due to the hostility of the Khwarazmian rulers
Anusha and Arang who not only attacked the khanate, but robbed, arrested or
enslaved Muscovite merchants on their way to Bukhara.4° However, even when
Subhan Quli himself was on good terms with Khwarazm, he appears to have made no
special effort to develop the Muscovite trade. Although in 1671 his advisers
expressed the wish that ambassadors and traders might travel between the two
countries, six years went by before Subhan Quli's-first and only ambassador to
Moscow, ‘Ali Murad, was sent on his way. And the message which was entrusted to
~ him only referred to the establishment of diplomatic relations. Nothing was said about

trade.46

;

Subhan Quli-was more interested in trade with Iran. He despatched at least six
embassies to the Shah whose main purpose, according to Kaempfer, was to take
advantage of the ambassadors’ diplomatic status in order to sell off their goods at a
sizeable profit. Even when Subhan Quli only ruled Balkh, he expected his
ambassadors to sell goods in Iran on a large scale and to encourage foreign merchants
to visit the khanate. The envoy whom Chardin met-in Isfahan in 1674 had brought
over a valuable consignment worth 20,000 écus (180,000 tanga). He tried hard to
barter these good against Chardin's jewels and he did his best to persuade the
Frenchman to go to Balkh: ‘Il me faisoit depuis quelques jours de grandes instances
d'aller avec lui en Tartarie, me promettant que le Prince de Balkh, son Maitre, me
feroit beaucoup d'honneur & de caresses, & m'achéteroit pour bien de l'argent’.47
Subhan Quli's trade motivation was less strong in the case of Mughal India, but it
still existed, as borne out by Manucci's account of the transactions carried out by the
Balkh and Bukharan embassies of 1661, and by the excessive number of robes (105
robes) which the Balkh ambassador of 1668, Shadman Khwajah, was given to take

back.48
However, all this only helped the khan. It did not help individual traders, who,
like the rest of the population, were badly hit by the constant introduction of
additional taxes and by the inflated level of ordinary taxes, assessed seven times too
high. Landowners apparently tried to give their land away as a result, but no one was
willing to accept their offer. And according to Khwajah Samandar, the combined

short of 10 nukhid’ which would explain why Chekhovich translates the expression bedeh
nukhid as ‘short of up to 10 nukhid’.
44 Chekhovich, Dokumenty, 41-46, 47-55. Davidovich, Istoriya, 39-47, 92.

45 See chapter 9 above. Materialy, 259.

46 "Nakaz", 64-6. Materialy, 230-1.

47 Kaempfer, 238-9. Chardin, II, 121. For the value of the tanga agains the écu see Burton,
Bukharan trade, 87.

48 Manucci, II, 37. Saqi, 97.
424

The khans' contribution

effect of the drought in 1688, the ‘constant passage of troops’ over the previous few
years and the ‘unending tax demands’ ‘led to the end of agriculture and to the
dispersal of the population’... at least until the hard frost and rain of December 1688

caused ‘the rivers to sing’ and revived the earth!49
Subhan Quli was not indifferent to the plight of the peasants, however. He tried to
revive agriculture in the khanate by several means. When the peasants fled their
fields, landowners who were prepared to reclaim them were given the fields and were
freed from taxes for a year, as an incentive. The new owners were then asked to take
back any peasants who returned impoverished and to protect them from anyone who
might try and tax them. This was certainly the case when Khwajah Misa Hajjim, who
had land and water rights in the area, was given the village of Jaukanda, which had
become ‘a heap of earth’. The peasants, he was told, would only pay dues (feudal
dues and the water tax?) to his servants and to no one else. Another measure that

should have borne fruit was Subhan Quli's strict policy of dismissing and replacing
greedy officials known to have taken bribes, demanded excessive taxes, or deprived
the people of the water ration allotted for irrigation purposes. However, although this
worked in 1684, when the officials who were appointed proved to be quite honest
and efficient, Subhan Quli was not able to follow this policy consistently, because he
was always pressed for money and struggling to keep the peace in the khanate. He
was obliged to sell offices in return for money or support, which meant that he could
not demand high standards from the new officials, and the people suffered as a

result.°°
In his land transactions Subhan Quli was less greedy than his brother, for when
he ‘sold’ a plot of land, two-thirds of which was intended to revert to the Crown
according to the one-third rule, he asked for no money and was content instead with a
copy of the Qur’an in full payment. This was not even a ploy to acquire a suitable
addition to his rich library, for he did not demand that the Qur’an be the work of a
particular calligrapher or miniaturist. He only specified in one case that the manuscript
should be bound in red leather. And unless red leather was particularly valuable in the
latter part of his reign, it must be assumed that the sacred volume was a token
payment for what was in effect an outright gift of the third part of a piece of land,

including the right to all appertaining taxes.>!
Subhan Quli also appears to have discontinued the nefarious practice of issuing
new coins with excessive frequency. Only four types of tanga are known for his 20year reign and if no more were issued, then traders must have been thankful for being
given a simpler currency to deal with. On the other hand, however, he made no effort
to raise the intrinsic value of the tanga. For a few years after 1681 its silver content
remained at the low level of 25 per cent, going down to 22.5 per cent between

1100/1689 and 1695 and only rising slightly, to 30 per cent, in 1699.52
49 Istoriya Tadzhikskogo naroda, Il, ii, 43-44. Khwajah Samandar, 133-4.

50 Mukhtarov, Materialy, 26, 28. Khwajah Samandar, 103-4, 165.
51 Chekhovich, Dokumenty, 90-3, 94-97. According to Davidovich ("Feodal'nyi zel'nyi milk", 46)
the mention of a Qur'an was only necessary in order to make the sale seem real and legal. In fact
the sale of the whole plot was totally fictitious but it was a necessary pre-requisite which enabled
the khans to give away Crown land, together with taxation rights, to officials, dignitaries or
members of their family (no doubt as a reward for service or support). See Chekhovich, "V.V.

Bartol'd", 153, for a particularly complex series of transactions which were apparently entered into
by a gadi with the connivance of Imam Quli.

52 Davidovich, Istoriya, 48-49, 92-93. Chekhovich, Dokumenty, 69-77, 78-83, 84-89.
425

Bukharan trade

To sum up this review of the khans' contribution to trade, it would appear that,
apart from ‘Abdallah II, Bagi Muhammad and Nadir Muhammad, the rulers of the
khanate generally tended to take a purely selfish view of commerce. They were more
interested in developing their own private trade than in furthering commercial
enterprise, and looked upon their subjects as a potential source of income from whom
they could obtain ever-increasing amounts of cash to try and fill their ever-empty
Treasury.

426

13
Trade with Asia

The information available on the khanate's Asian commerce is rather piecemeal
and often vague, because local historians concentrated on battles and dynastic rivalries
as being of far greater interest, and no trade registers as such appear to have been
kept. However, useful information has been gleaned from the reports of ambassadors

and foreign merchants. When visiting the khanate, or whenever they met Bukharans
abroad, they were so intrigued by them that they generally questioned them at length
and noted down whatever they were told about their country, their ruler and their
trading activities.

I Trade with nomadic and semi-nomadic peoples
1. Noghays and Bashkirs. The main items exchanged were Muscovite slaves
and Bukharan materials. The slaves were generally prisoners taken by raiders from
their villages and fields, or when they were out fishing. Muscovite ambassadors to
the Noghay chiefs were also liable to be treacherously seized by their hosts and sold
into slavery, as in 1581 when Ambassador Devochkin and his party were sold to
Bukhara by Urus, chief of the Big Horde. There were also times when, although the
chief himself might be well disposed towards Moscow, he was unable to prevent his
followers from attacking and seizing settled Muscovites or travellers. Thus in 1608
Ishterek asked the voevoda of Saratov to send him 40 strel'tsy in order to prevent his
men from selling into slavery a ‘whole lot’ of Muscovite captives whom they had
brought to his encampment. But the voevoda took no action, and so the Muscovites
were sold to visiting Bukharan merchants.
The practice of selling Muscovites to Bukhara continued during the seventeenth
century. A number of the slaves ransomed by Daudov and Kasimov from Bukhara in
1677 named the Noghays as their original captors. Others had lost their freedom to
Bashkir and Qalmag raiders who later sold them to the Noghays. The Noghays resold
them in Bukhara, and they remained there until they were freed by Daudov and
Kasimov.
Bukharans must also have been interested in buying from the Noghays the hardy
and well-trained horses described by Tavernier which were invaluable in military
campaigns, because they were able to subsist on a modicum of food and to withstand
the sharpest variations in temperature. For their part, the Noghays relied on the
khanate for their supplies of clothing, cottons and other materials, and they may have

also purchased from Bukhara the cooking utensils which they were unable to
manufacture themselves. In 1551 the chief of the Big Horde, Isma‘il, wrote to his

Bukharan trade

brother Yusuf: ‘Your men go to trade in Bukhara, mine in Moscow, and if I fight
Moscow I shall have to go naked’.
Although the Noghays went to Bukhara to conduct their trade, it is not known
whether there was a Noghay caravanserai in the town in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, as there was in the nineteenth century.2 But Bukharan merchants continued
to call at the Noghay encampments on their way to and from Muscovy, at least until,
together with other Muslim traders, they were expressly forbidden to do so by Tsar
Aleksei's regulation of 1661.3
The Bashkirs also supplied Bukharans with slaves, possibly in exchange for
weapons, such as those which were thought to have reached them from Siberia in the
1670s.4 These slaves were either taken to the khanate by Bashkir traders, or else they
were purchased in Ufa and nearby settlements by Bukharans on their way to or from
Siberia and Muscovy. They were also acquired through the Noghays, as mentioned,
and through Khwarazmian middlemen.>
2. Mongols. Far less is known about the items which Bukharans exchanged
with the Mongols, although it seems likely that at least some of the rhubarb which the
merchants of the khanate sold in Muscovy, Siberia and other countries, came from the
Mongol encampments. According to the Scottish doctor John Bell, who lived in
Muscovy for several years and travelled through Mongol territory between 1719 and
1722, rhubarb was the principal article which the nomads were able to barter for other
goods, as ‘great quantities are produced without any culture. The Mongalls gather and
dry it in autumn and bring it to this market (Urga/Ulan Bator) where it is bought at an
easy rate’. He added that ‘all the trade (in Urga was) done by barter with no money
involved’, and that gold ingots, damasks and ‘other silks and cotton stuffs’, together
with tea, Muscovite fur and porcelain ‘usually of inferior quality’, were taken there by
Chinese, Muscovite and other merchants. Since all these items were of the type
generally carried by Bukharan merchants, they too are likely to have supplied them to
the Mongols on their way to or from China. Bukharans may also have sold to them
some of the carpets and gems which they took to Siberia, as well as the firearms
which, to Tsar Alexei's chagrin, the Mongols, Bukharans and others were acquiring
and learning to use before 1675, when he specifically forbade their sale to visiting

foreigners.®
Those Bukharans who traded or lived with the eastern Mongols and the Qalmaq
were very well informed about Mongol-Qalmagq relations and about their internal
problems. They were a mine of useful information for the Muscovite ambassadors
travelling to and from China, and the Siberian authorities relied on them to provide
advance warning of any planned attacks on Muscovite settlements. Sometimes
Bukharan traders acted as unofficial ambassadors for the Mongols. Thus in 1675 a
Tobol'sk Bukharan, Seidyak Kulmametov, tried to help their ambassadors in
1 Novosel'skii, 32, 63, 68. Gnevushev, 178, 200, 209. Materialy, 387-8, 394-5, 396-7, 285.
Tavernier, Les six voyages, III, 382-3. Basin, 38.

2 Meyendorff, Voyage, 190. Khanykov, Opisanie, 88.

3 D.A.L., Ill, 256.
$ DAD eVIs305.
5 Materialy, 386-97, 285-7.
6 Bell, Pekin, 88, 92. Du Halde, IV, 98, 102. Rossabi, 46. Anon., Beschreibung. Titov, 136-8.
D.A.1., VI, 375. Mulyukin, 56.

428

Trade with Asia

Moscow when they asked the Tsar to release their chiefs' former vassals, the
Buryats, from their oaths of allegiance and from their payments of tribute in return for
protection. Kulmametov

intended to travel back with them in 1676, but he was

unexpectedly detained in Tobol'sk, much to the anger of the Tushetu Khan and
Oncharoi Sain Khan. There were two particular reasons for their anger. Firstly, they
were unable to make out Tsar Aleksei's answer to their request, for they had counted
on Kulmametov to translate it for them. Secondly, their envoy had told them that
Kulmametov had been’entrusted with a very positive message from the Tsar who had
agreed to return the Buryats, and yet the message which eventually reached them with
ambassador Turskii in 1681 was that ‘no orders had been given by the Tsar to send
back the émigrés and the yasak-payers from Bratsk (the Buryats)’. They felt sure
therefore that there had been some foul play in Tobol'sk. Refusing to believe
Turskii's message, they asked him to write on their behalf to Tsar Aleksei's
successor, Fedor II, mentioning the Buryats and Kulmametov.?
3. Qirghiz. The trading operations which took place with the Qirghiz are not
documented, for the writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries only wrote
about Qirghiz attacks, not about their more peaceful occupations. However, although
the commercial activities involving the Qirghiz of Qarategin, Khutlan and Farghana
are not recorded, Mahmud b. Wali does mention in passing that Qirghiz horses
(probably from that area) were sold in Kashghar in his day. Since horses of any type
were always in demand in China, Bukharan merchants are likely to have purchased
some on their way to Kashghar, in return for which they probably sold some of the
porcelain, pottery, tea, silks, tobacco, wine and precious stones from China, which

the Qirghiz of the T'ien Shan are known to have obtained in China in the eighteenth
century. As for the Qirghiz of the Yenisei, also known as Buruts or Black Qalmaq,
they certainly traded with the Bukharans who resided in Tomsk. They also had some
Bukharan captives in their encampments whose presence may or may not have
encouraged the traders from the khanate to visit these encampments when they went
to Tomsk. In 1622 a group of Tomsk Bukharans asked for permission to go there and
stayed for a whole year. Although no details have as yet been found about their stay
with the Qirghiz, it can be assumed that they acquired the local furs and livestock in
exchange for cotton materials and other essentials.8

4. Qalmaq. More evidence is available about Bukharan trading operations with,
or for the Qalmaq, because the rulers on both sides were involved, as were ordinary
merchants. Thus Imam Quli's envoy, the luckess Kazi Kaziev, who was detained in
Tara for two whole years, spent some time trading at Kuisha's encampment before he
reached Tara in 1634. The Torgout taisha Elden went to trade in Bukhara in 1637.
His brother, Louzan, sent Nadir Muhammad a Muscovite slave in about 1642. Two

years later he sold another slave to the khan's ambassador and, at about the same
time, he threatened to sell the Tsar's envoy into slavery in Bukhara.? Similarly the

7 Russko-kitaiskie otnosheniya, Il, 260, 242, 781-2, 268.
8 Mahmid b. Wali, More tain, 72. Istoriya Kirghizii, 1, 253. Bakhrushin, Nauchnye

trudy, Il,

182. Pamyatniki Sibirskoi istorii, 5, 17. See Ziyaev, Ekonomicheskie svyazi 68-72, for goods
supplied by Bukharans to Tomsk and Krasnoyarsk.
9 Miller, II, 462-3. Bogoyavlenskii, "Materialy", 88-89, 99, 80. Materialy, 200. Here Louzan is
called Lauzan.

429

Bukharan trade

Derbet Kuisha sent a number of Muscovite captives to the Bukharan slave mart in
1635 and another Derbet, Daichin, is known to have sent trade caravans to Bukhara in
1641 and again in 1642.!° Kuchum's descendants, who were closely associated with
the Qalmaq, also traded with the khanate,!! and Bukharans played a major role in
supplying them all.
Bukharan merchants not only took goods to Qalmaq and Kuchumite
encampments, they also traded on behalf of the various Qalmaq Princes in Siberia and
China. In fact Bukharan merchants seem to have accompanied every Qalmaq mission
to Siberia, Muscovy, or China. To give some idea of the numbers of Bukharans sent
with these missions, 70 were despatched by the Sungar Galdan to Irkutsk in 1684, at
least 8 in 1688, 10 in 1689 and 15 in 1691, and it is known that 100 accompanied his
envoys to China in 1690. Similarly the Derbet Ablai sent an ambassador and 200
Bukharan traders to escort Seitkul Ablin to China in 1668, and there were 3 Bukharan
traders in the suite of the envoy from the Derbet Dalai Ubashi who arrived in Tara in

1653.12

Some of the Qalmaq's Bukharan trading agents came from the khanate. Others
lived among them, such as ‘the Bukharans who plough for (the Khoshout) Ablai’ and
those who ‘belong to the kontaisha (the Sungar Batur)'s children’, whom Baikov
encountered in their encampments in 1654-5.}3
Sometimes the Qalmaq Princes (taisha) made use of the services of Bukharan

merchants as interpreters or ambassadors.!4 Thus in 1645 the Khoshout taisha
Kundelen sent four Bukharan ambassadors to Ufa, one of whom at least was
described as a merchant ‘from the land of Bukhara’. These ambassadors travelled
with two Qalmaq servants, and their task was to assure the Muscovite authorities that
Kundelen and his brother ‘were good servants of the Tsar's, were always submissive
and had never attacked’, nor incited anyone else to attack Muscovy. They also
explained that Kundelen was at the time trying to persuade other, unruly, taishas to
become ‘obedient’ to the Tsar.
Similarly Dara'ika, widow of the Derbet Daichin, made use of Bukharans as
intermediaries. In July 1647, eight months after her ambassadors had been refused
access to Tyumen’, a second delegation from Dara'ika was sent there to investigate
the matter and to demand access to the town. The ambassador himself, however, did
not conduct the negotiations. He sent ahead four Bukharan traders who had travelled
with his party. During their interview with the local voevoda the Bukharans conveyed
Dara'ika's dismay at the authorities’ action, for Tyumen' had been open to Derbet
ambassadors in Daichin's day and they had been permitted to trade there freely.

Angrily contrasting the present situation in Tyumen' with that in Tara and Tobol'sk,
10 Materialy po istorii russko-mongol'skikh otnoshenii, 11, 229-30, 66, 26. Miller, II, 462.

1] Miller, II, 109-110, 168, 444-7.
12 Rumyantsev, 294, 333, 341, 385-6. TsGADA,

fond 1121, op.1F, no. 92, listy.115-6. Russko-

kitaiskie otnosheniya, 1, 289-90. Materialy po istorii russko-mongol'skikh otnoshenii, Il, 388.

Ziatkin, Istoriya, 223-4. Pamyatniki Sibirskoi istorii, 69-70.
13 Materialy po istorii russko-mongol'skikh otnoshenii, I, 401. Russko-kitaiskie otnosheniya, I,
325. Demidova, Pervye russkie diplomaty, 116, 117, 119. See also Baddeley, II, 179, 187, 189,

for Bukharans working for the Sungars Senga and Chokur in the 1660's, who were apparently
taken prisoner in earlier wars with Bukhara (possibly in 1643, at the same time as the two Qazaq
tribes mentioned in chapter 7).
14 Tbid., II, 183, 187, for mention of a Bukharan interpreter at the Sungar Senga's in 1667 and a
Bukharan cleric sent to Tomsk on behalf of Senga in 1664. Zlatkin, Istoriya, 211.

430

Trade with Asia

both of which were still open, the Bukharans went on to warn the voevoda to expect
trouble if access was refused. Dara'ika's ambassador's attitude was much milder and
more pragmatic. On being told that the prohibition still applied, he merely enquired
whether the new measure had been taken in retaliation against some Qalmaq attack.
It is also interesting to note that both in 1653 and in 1661 Ablai's negotiations
with Moscow were conducted by a Bukharan, and that in 1675 the Qalmaq
ambassador whom his Dutch counterpart met at Ustyug Velikii on the Dvina was not

a Qalmagq, but a Muslim from Bukhara, whose suite were Qalmaq.!5
Bukharan merchants supplied a great variety of goods to the Qalmaq. They took
them cotton materials from the khanate, such as zandanichi and karbas, in such
quantities that the Sungar Senga was able to distribute them as gifts to the Tsar's
envoys in 1667.16 They sold them flour from Siberia, caftans, coins which are
thought to have been used for decorative purposes, luxury goods such as silks, and
Bukharan tents like the one in which Tomilo Petrov was received by the Derbet Dalai
in 1616. At times when the Qalmaq were not at war with the khanate, Bukharan
merchants provided them with weapons.!7 They may have also supplied them with
some of the large quantities of combs, earrings, needles and mirrors which they
purchased in Siberia, bone combs being in such demand among the Qalmaq that they
always figured in the list of gifts presented to their envoys in Moscow. And it is likely
that crimson cloth, furs, corals, and carpets were also provided, for the Qalmaq
ambassador whom Van Klenk interviewed at Ustyug Velikii listed all these items as
forming part of a Bukharan merchant's stock-in-trade.!8 Siberian sables, in
particular, were so popular with the Qalmaq that their export from Siberia had to be
prohibited frequently by the various Tsars, and since Bukharan merchants are known
to have sold such furs in faraway China, they are likely to have supplied them also to
the nomads' encampments which were much more accessible. Finally Bukharans are
known to have supplied the Qalmaq with a type of sheepskin boot specially designed

for their use and made in Astrakhan.!9
The goods which Bukharans took back from the Qalmaq encampments fell into
four main categories: livestock, furs, rhubarb and slaves. The livestock consisted of
horses, camels, cattle, sheep and goats, most of which appear to have been intended
for resale in Siberia or Astrakhan, although the horses were also sold in China.
Hides, worked into richly-decorated Qalmaq saddles, were also carried by
Bukharans, one such saddle being presented to Tsar Aleksei by Mulla Farrukh in
1669. And they probably purchased in the Qalmaq encampments the felt and sledge
blankets which they occasionally took to Tobol'sk and Tara.
Among the Qalmaq furs, red fox of inferior quality seems to have been a
favourite. It was generally resold in Siberia, as in 1655-6 when a single Bukharan
took 175 such pelts to Tobol'sk. Qalmaq lambskins were also taken to Siberia, 2
caravans from the khanate delivering as many as 15,030 to Tara in 1689. And there
was Clearly a market in Siberia for Qalmaq fur coats, for one Bukharan merchant
15 Materialy po istorii russko-mongol'skikh
Van Klenk, 344.

otnoshenii, Il, 260-1, 294-5, 399. Miller, II, 519.

16 Baddeley, II, 185, 188.

17 Ziyaev, Ekonomicheskie

svyazi, 57, 55. Bogoyavlenskii,

"Materialy", 89-90, 58. Zlatkin,

Istoriya, 223. Russko-kitaiskie otnosheniya, Il, 781. Modorov, 132.

18 Van Klenk, 441. Zlatkin, Istoriya, 223.
19 See chapter 15, pass., for the numerous prohibitions regarding the export of sables. Golikova,

194.

43]

Bukharan trade

brought to Tomsk as many as 68 wor sheepskin coats ‘from the Qalmaq’ in 1653.
Finally Qalmaq ermine was taken to China where it fetched a price of only 25 lans
(roubles) per 100 in 1676.2°
Delivering Qalmaq furs to Siberia was not a ridiculous case of ‘taking coals to
Newcastle’. In fact Bukharans were performing a very useful service, for the
ordinary people of the area bought the imported furs in order to line their caftans.
These furs were not only cheaper and stronger than local furs, they were also more
easily available on the market. Local furs, especially those of a better type, were
generally taken by the Tsar, to be distributed later in lieu of wages to his officials and
soldiers, or as gifts to fellow rulers.
Both types of rhubarb were available at the Qalmaq encampments, and Bukharans
seem to have bought large quantities.2! In 1653, for example, consignments
weighing respectively 17 pud (278.46 kg) and 24 pud (393.12 kg) were declared in
Tomsk by two Bukharan merchants. The slaves which the Qalmaq offered for sale
were likely to be indigenous Siberians, Muscovites, Qalmaq from vanquished tribes,
Mongols or even Chinese. A most valuable commodity, these slaves would be sold
advantageously in Siberia, Muscovy, China and the khanate.
Bukharans also purchased ornate weapons from the Qalmaq which might be
chased with gold, like the ones which Nadir Muhammad received from Imam Quli in
1639.22 And no doubt they bought Qalmaq musk and castoreum, both in the nomads'
encampments and in Siberia to take back to the khanate, as they did in the early
eighteenth century when, according to Jonas Hanway, they bought ‘musk, castorian

and other valuable drugs’ from the ‘black Khalmucks’
.73
5. Qazaqs. There was such lively trade with the Qazaqs that when, in the early
sixteenth century, Muhammad Shaibani gave orders for it to cease, the angry Qazaqs
attacked Ma wara’ al-nahr in reprisal. The main items which the Qazaqs supplied to
the khanate were livestock, articles made of hide and wool, furs, wooden objects and
slaves.
The Qazaq horses were very hardy and reliable, but not handsome. Short and
with a large stomach, they could be used as a means of transport or as draught
animals. The Qazags also ate their meat, drank their mares' milk (kumys) and used
their hides as clothes, much to the horror of the people of Ma wara’ al-nahr, who said

they were ‘like wolves, dressed in hides’. Because of their versatility these horses
were a much sought-after commodity which Bukharan merchants resold easily in both

Siberia and the khanate.”4
The Qazaq sheep provided them with meat, fat, milk, string for their bows,
clothes, shoes, or even shrouds and soap. This remarkable animal stored all its bodily

fat in a very heavy tail (kurdyuk) which has been said to weigh between 6 and 82 kg.
20 Materialy, 346-9, 354-6, 356-9, 360-1. Russko-indiiskie otnosheniya, 45. Materialy po istorii
russko-mongol'skikh

otnoshenii, 1, 141. Golikova,

no.1, list 20a. Ziyaev, Ekonomicheskie
kitaiskie otnosheniya, I, 414.

194. TsGADA,

fond 109, op.1, 1669-75

svyazi, 61, 69. Potanin, "Privoz",

138. Russko-

a Cherenkovyi and kopytchatyi, see p. 384 above for definition.
Ibid.

23 Kurts, "Sochinenie", 105. Ziyaev, Ekonomicheskie syyazi, 55. Hanway, 243.

24 Fadl Allah, 101. Sultanov, Kochevye plemena, 54-55. Hafiz Tanish, 145a. Ocherki istorii
SSSR, 876.

432

Trade with Asia

For the purposes of barter its most useful derivative was the supple material made
from its hide. This material, available in several colours, was apparently so beautiful
that in Bukhara it fetched the same price as satin. It had the added advantage of being
totally waterproof, a peculiarity which Seifi attributed to ‘the special grasses used in
its preparation’, and which made it particularly suitable for rainproof capes.25
The nineteenth-century historian Levshin also mentions a waterproof material
produced by the Qazaqs and used for clothes. This was probably made in the same
way as the one described by Seifi, although in Levshin's day it was only available in
dark yellow, and was made from either sheep or goat's hide. His detailed explanation
of the process of fabrication might be of interest, especially as either tea or rhubarb,
both of which were carried by Bukharans, was used for the dyeing process. The
hides were first sprinkled with warm water, rolled up and kept in a warm atmosphere
for some time, after which it was possible to scrape the hairs off without using either
chemicals or dung. During the second stage the hides were dried in an airy place,
soaked 3 to 4 days in sour milk and dried again, this time in the dark. The third stage
consisted of kneading, smoking, and kneading again. During the fourth and final
stage the hides were dyed. A dye made of kvass (Russian rye-beer), sheep's lard, and
either rhubarb root or tea was applied to both surfaces of the hide and allowed to dry
for two to three days. Several applications were needed in order to make the hides

totally waterproof, colourfast, and ready for use.26
The Qazaq camels generally had two humps, as did the Bactrian camels of the
khanate. Strong and sturdy, they pulled along the Qazaqs' heavy house on wheels
(arba), and according to Sir Alexander Burnes, who travelled in the area in the
nineteenth century, they carried loads of up to 640 lb. These camels transported the
goods of Bukharan merchants to Russia in his day, and they were probably used in
the same way in the earlier period.27
Among the by-products derived from the Qazaq livestock which were purchased
by Bukharans modern historians list coats of heavy cloth (armyak) and carpets. One
might add to the list the large patterned pieces of felt made from wool or camel hair
(koshma) and other items made by the Qazagqs, such as the birchwood arrows which
Fadl Allah b. Ruzbikhan thought ‘perfect and strong’, and the delicately-carved reins
which were their speciality in the early sixteenth century.28 Qazaq furs acquired en
route for Siberia probably included the pelts of the little grey or white fox called
korsak which in the nineteenth century were to become an important part of Qazaq
exports to Russia. In seventeenth century Siberia, as mentioned above, the korsak
was assessed far more cheaply than a fully-grown fox (between one-fifth and oneeighth of the price). It sold at 12 to 19 den'gi per pelt and figured repeatedly in the
lists of goods which Bukharans delivered to Tara, Tobol'sk and Tyumen’. Thus in
1647 a certain A. Abushakhov who arrived in Tyumen’ from the khanate declared 34
korsaki, together with 2 fur coats, 4 sheepskins and 100 lambskins. And A.

25 Sultanov, Kochevye plemena, 53-55, quotes Jenkinson and Levshin for the weight of the sheep's
tail. See Sultanov, "Kratkoe opisanie", 49, on Seifi. Bartol'd (Sochineniya, Il, 97) gives a
different interpretation of Seifi's words, which Sultanov disagrees with, according to which the
material was made from the wool of the sheep, and its waterproof peculiarity was due to ‘the
special grasses eaten by the sheep’.

26 Levshin, III, 210-1.
27 Burnes, II, 427.
28 Istoriya Kazakhshkoi SSR, 1, 343-4. Fadl Allah, 128.
433

Bukharan trade

Mansurov brought 200 korsaki to Tobol'sk from Kazan’ in 1687. 7?
Finally, there is little doubt that Bukharans will have attempted to buy Muscovite
and other captives from the Qazagqs, for there was always a great demand for slaves in
the khanate. The responsibility for keeping the fields irrigated, and maintaining the
canals and their banks, for example, was entrusted to them and it was their work
which, according to Pazukhin, kept the people from starving. Slaves were also useful

in times of war, for they were enrolled in the khans' armies.*°
The Qazags also actively engaged in trade with Bukhara. They took slaves to the
khanate, most of whom were Qalmaq, as Qalmaq-Qazaq hostility was a particular
feature of much of this period. Other slaves included Qara Kitai, Qaraqalpaqs and
Muscovites seized during armed forays and raids. No figures can be given for the
scale of this trade, although it is known that in September 1694 a group of ‘Tatars of
the Qazaq Horde’

seized 20 Muscovites,

men

and women,

whom

they sold in

Turkestan, and that in 1695 another group captured 60 unarmed Muscovites at
Yamysh.
In the ten months which the Muscovite envoy Fedor Skibin spent at Tauka's in
1694-5 he noted that two Qazagq trading parties made the round trip from Turkestan to
Bukhara, but he gave no details of any items apart from slaves which they might have
offered for sale, nor does he specify the articles purchased there. However, we know
from Shaibani's biographer that in the early sixteenth century the Qazaqs were keen to
purchase Bukharan karbas which they used for their clothes, and, even more
importantly, for their shrouds. In the late seventeenth century they appear to have
purchased such cotton not only for their own use, but also for resale, judging from
the Qazaq trader and ambassador who arrived in Tobol'sk in 1693 and who were
found to be carrying four bales of Bukharan zenden' and byaz' (zandanichi and
karbas).3! The Qazaqs also purchased much of their military supplies from Bukhara
in the late seventeenth century. Although, according to Skibin, they knew how to
make their own gunpowder, they went on buying some from the khanate, together

with guns, lead and Bukharan bows.32
In the sixteenth and the early part of the seventeenth century the Qazaqs are also
likely to have purchased grain, flour, silks, metal, ceramic and glass goods from the
khanate, for they did not produce them themselves, being mainly nomadic at the time.
By the second part of the seventeenth century, on the other hand, they were living a
more sedentary life near the Syr-Darya towns and this must have greatly reduced the
range of goods which they required. According to the Sungar Galdan's envoys to
Siberia, by 1691 the Qazaqs were growing ‘all types of grain near the towns and big

villages’, together with a variety of vegetables. However, they continued to buy
cotton materials in Bukhara, as did the trader and ambassador mentioned above. And
they may have begun to purchase silks, ready-made clothes, jewellery, horse brasses,
sabres and suits of armour in the khanate in the late seventeenth century, as they

apparently did in the eighteenth century.33

29 Strahlenberg, 397. Levshin, I, 132. Materialy, 346-7, 352-3, 378. Vilkov, Remeslo, table 29.
Ziyaev, Ekonomicheskie svyazi, 66, 56-57, 59, 60.

30 See D.A.L, X, 383, for Russian captives taken by the Qazagqs to sell in Bukhara in 1695.
31 Thid., X, 380, 381, 383, 389. Fadl Allah, 101. Kazakhsko-russkie otnosheniya, 16.

32 DAI, X, 389. Materialy, 265.
33 Rumyantsev, 408. Kazakhsko-russkie otnosheniya, 16. Ibragimoy, 47.

434

Trade with Asia

II Trade

with Asian

countries

1. Turkey and Kashghariya. Very little is known about the Bukharo-Turkish
trade, but from Tavernier's account of his travels it seems that Turkish caravanserais
were very small, accommodating no more than 100 people, i.e. less than one whole
caravan, at a time.
The spinels of Badakhshan certainly reached Istanbul where local jewellers
worked them with great skill. And after Tsar Aleksei gave an Armenian company the
monopoly for importing silk into Muscovy in 1667, Bukharan merchants apparently
began to take their own silk to Turkey, and from there to Germany.
In 1634, according to Henry Blount, who was then in Istanbul, the caravan trade
was very lively in Turkey. Blount explained that caravans arrived there from Persia,
Arabia and also from “Tartary’ by which he appears to have meant the khanate. He
added that this, “as well as other trades’, was ‘managed chiefly by the Armenian
Christians and the Jews’, and went on to list the commodities taken to Istanbul by the
English, many of which could have been supplied just as easily by the merchants of
the khanate. These were ‘rawsilk of Persia, carpets, cotton-wool, cotton yarn,
shagreen skins,..rhubarb, the product of eastern Tartary (sic),...zeduary’. Other
items carried by Bukharans might have included the famous paper of Samarqand and
the type of gold-embroidered cloth which Nadir Muhammad sent to the Sultan in large
quantities, together with racing horses, in 1649.34 Finally Bukharans are likely to
have taken to Istanbul the spices, silks, dyes, porcelain and precious stones which
they acquired in India and China.
With regard to the Bukharo-Kashghariyan trade of the period, we have to rely

mainly on the piecemeal information found in Mahmud b. Wali and in Goés. Mahmid
b. Wali tells us that before 1640 very little cotton was grown in Kashghar, and that
the merchants of the town rarely left their vilayet. Kashghar, however, was on the
caravan route to China, and as such it was visited by Bukharan merchants, so one can
assume that they were at least partly responsible for supplying the town with the
musk, the gold, the clothes sewn with gold thread and the “Chinese goods’ which
Mahmid b. Wali saw there. He gives no details about these Chinese goods but they
probably included silver, porcelain and tea, all of which Efremov listed in the
eighteenth century as items which the merchants from “Bukhara, Kukan (sc.

Kokand), Russia and China’ took to Kashghar.?>
We know from the Portuguese missionary Goés that in the early seventeenth
century a very valuable hard stone called yu shi was being mined in deserted parts of
the Kashghariyan mountains near Yarkand. It was then taken to China where it was
made into vases and brooches. This stone, which Goés and Trigautio call marble or
jasper, and which Yule and others call jade, figures among the gifts or tributes taken
to China by merchants from Samarqand. The merchants probably bought it in
Yarkand, and then delivered as much as 50 lb apiece to the Emperor, asking in return

for satin, porcelain, silk and medicinal herbs.*® In addition to the yu shi stone, in the
latter part of the seventeenth century Bukharans are known to have purchased and
transported cotton goods from Kashghariya which were in direct competition with
similar items made in the khanate. Thus in 1685 two Bukharans brought to Tara 310
34 Osborne, I, 509. Hammer, Geschichte, III, 346.

35 Mahmid b. Wali, More tain, 71-72. Efremov, 143.
36 Ritter, "Vostochnyi ili kitaiskii Turkestan", 328, 335-7. Yule, [V, 219-20. Amyot, 244, 247.
435

Bukharan trade

pieces of zenden’, byaz' and vyboika from Yarkand, plus an unspecified number of
cotton sashes also originating in Yarkand, and in December 1695 Bukharan visitors
brought 2,240 pieces of kitaika to Tyumen’, together with 210 pieces of byaz' from

Turfan.37
Bukharan merchants would continue to act as middlemen between the
Kashghariyan producers and the Siberian market during the eighteenth century,
after the Qalmagq rulers of Kashghariya (Jungariya) began to trade directly
Siberia, selling there the goods mentioned above, together with Kashghariyan

new
even
with
furs

and livestock.38
2. Kwarazm. Despite frequent hostilities, trade existed between the two
countries. A particular difficulty, however, was the fact that weights and measures of
the same name, but of different value, were used. The weight of the small Khivan

batman was 4.914 kg in 1641 and 4.095 kg in 1669, but neither of the two small
Bukharan batman could be equated with it. The Bukharan shari‘a batman or mann
was far lighter at 864 grammes, and there was a far heavier batman of 24.5 kg (1.5
pud) which, according to Mulla Farrukh, was used for weighing saltpetre in the late
1660s.39
:
However, the weight of the kharvar (ass's load) and the shuturwar (camel load)
are likely to have been very similar, if not identical, in the two khanates for practical
reasons. For even the Russian colonisers of the latter part of the nineteenth century
appear to have adopted the Bukharan shuturwar (255.6 kg) as the optimum weight
which might be carried by a local camel, after altering it slightly to 16 pud (262.088
kg) to make it fit within their own system of weights.49
Another difficulty was the total absence of any Khwarazmian silver coins, which
meant that trade had to be conducted either in the local copper coins, or else in silver

coins from Bukhara, Iran or other countries.*!
It seems clear that Khwarazmian merchants travelled to the khanate, for there was

at least one Urganji caravanserai in the capital, but there is little precise information
available about their activities. In 1620, for example, an Urganji merchant travelled to
Bukhara with Khokhlov. In 1646, Khwarazmians are said to have been trading in
Balkh with the Mughal invaders and if Shaikh Baba is to be credited and Aba ’1-Ghazi
was indeed at peace with ‘Abd al-‘Aziz, they may have also been trading in Bukhara
at the time. They were certainly going there to purchase their supplies of materials in
1669, for this was reported by the Tsar's ambassador to Khiva, Fedot'ev, and no
Muscovite ambassador worth his salt would have dared to include an unconfirmed
rumour in his official report. And this continued to be the case, for there were as

37 Ziyaev, Ekonomicheskie svyazi, 61, 66.
38 Potanin, "O karavannoi torgovle", 52, 54, 61.
39 TsGADA, fond 109, op.1, 1669-75 kn. 1, list 32a. Davidovich, Materialy po metrologii, 85, 87,
and Istoriya, 300, disagrees with Mulla Farrukh's translation of the weight of this particular

batman into puds. She believes that he rounded off its weight for the sake of simplicity and
ees he in fact meant a weight equal to 5,120 mithqal of the heavier, 5 grammes variety,
25.6 kg.
ie.,
40 According to Meyendorff (215) a camel load consisted of approximately 2 batman of 131.104 kg
each. Lehman, 28, makes the batman equal to 30,000 zolotniki or 129 kg. Davidovich makes the
batman in question equal to 128 kg in Materialy po metrologii, 87-88, 105-6, 1-8, but in
Istoriya, 294-306, 315, she gives the more precise weight of 312.5 Russian lb, i.e., 127.96 kg.

41 Veselovskii, Ocherk, 152.

436

Trade with Asia

many as 80 merchants in the Urganji caravanserai of Bukhara in 1694.42
Far less is known about Bukharans trading in Khiva. From the contradictory

reports submitted to Tsar Alexei by Fedot'ev in 1669 and Pazukhin in 1672, only two
things seem clear. First, that the export of Bukharan goods to Khwarazm was
considered so unprofitable that in 1669 very few merchants from Bukhara, and none
from Balkh, ventured there to sell their goods. Secondly, that by 1671 the price of
Khwarazmian silk, at 34 roubles a pud, was considered so advantageous, having
decreased from 60 roubles in 1669, that a large number of Bukharans bought up the
local supplies, leaving none for the Khivans to take to Astrakhan.43
Silk was in fact one of the main items which Bukharans purchased in Khwarazm.
In 1671 they bought the entire production of manufactured silk, i.e., 1,000 puds
(16,380 kg), and no doubt the Khivan Treasury greatly benefited from this. Slaves
constituted the other major commodity for which Bukharans were prepared to
undertake the journey to Khwarazm. The evidence available suggests that the sale of
slaves to Bukharans took place on such a large scale that it must have been very
profitable for the individuals concerned and also for the ruler of Khwarazm. Large
numbers of Muscovite and other slaves arrived yearly in Khwarazm, brought in by
Crimeans, Turkmen, Qalmaq, Bashkirs, Noghays and local merchants. Pazukhin
reported that Khivan merchants on their way back from Muscovy went specially to
the Bashkirs and the Qalmagq to purchase slaves. They were prepared to wait as long
as was necessary until Muscovites became available, after which, as Pazukhin saw
for himself, they herded these slaves towards Khwarazm in large numbers, with
much abuse and brutality. Muscovites might also be turned into slaves in Khiva itself
as in 1691, when Arang of Khiva arbitrarily arrested a group of merchants and sold
them into slavery. Many of these slaves would be purchased subsequently by
Bukharan merchants, or by the Bukharan Court, at a high price of 40 to 50 roubles
apiece, and this accounted for the Bukharan rulers' general reluctance to let them go
free in order to please the Tsars.“4
A much greater variety of goods was purchased from the khanate by
Khwarazmian merchants, but this is hardly surprising since the khanate was far
richer, and well-known for its highly developed craft industries. Cotton and other
materials from the khanate were much in demand, both for local use and for export.
In fact it seems likely that there was no production of zandanichi in Khwarazm in the
early 1620s, for not content with making Khokhlov and his party pay transit dues in
lengths of zenden' rather than money, Prince Habash seized an additional 900 lengths
from the envoy and the merchants accompanying him.4> Some of the zenden' which
Khwarazmian merchants and ambassadors took to Muscovy was also purchased in
Bukhara, as were the 100 pieces of ‘wide Bukharan zenden” which Khwarazmian
ambassador Amin Bahadur took as far as Moscow in 1641. Other items originating in
Bukhara and later sold in Muscovy included Bukharan sashes of which as many as
700 were declared by Amin Bahadur in 1641, Bukharan vyboika such as the 12
dress-lengths carried by the brother of Ilbars's ambassador Mahtambai in 1623, and
Bukharan silk dorogi of which a Khwarazmian merchant took six pieces to Ufa and

42 Khilkov, 397. Materialy, 317. TSGADA,

fond 134, op.1, 1668-70 no.1, list 28. Mirza Amin,

145a. See Chapter 9 for the fate that befell these merchants.

43 TsGADA, fond 134, op.1, 1668-70 no.1, list 28. "Nakaz", 68.
44 "Nakaz", 58-60. Pazukhin saw a party of 200 slaves being herded to Khwarazm. Materialy, 259,

280-1, 285-6. TsGADA, fond 109, op.1, 1677-8 kn.6, listy 57a, 58a, 60b, 61b, 71a, 72b, 79b.

45 Khilkov, 407, 412, 417.

437

Bukharan trade

Kazan' in 1619.46

Ready-made garments were also purchased in Bukhara. Thus Abu ’1-Ghazi was
able to give a Bukharan-made caftan of the type called azyam' as part payment for a

Muscovite slave circa 1650.47 Khwarazmians may have also relied on the khanate for

their purchases of Indian goods for they do not appear to have had any contact with
Mughal India before 1646. And even after 1646, when some measure of commercial
contact was established, no embassies seem to have been exchanged until 1667. The
Khwarazmian ambassador who went to India in that year was probably the first one
ever to be received there.48
By 1669 Khwarazm had begun to produce its own plain zenden', which could be
bought there at three-quarters of the price payable in Astrakhan. Since Khwarazmians
were also making their own karbas/byaz' by then, they no longer needed to buy either
zenden' or byaz' in Bukhara. However, according to ambassador Fedot'ey, they still
purchased the patterned byaz' called vyboika and the two-tone alacha in the khanate,

because they did not make intricately patterned (charovatyi) materials themselves.4?
They also bought a type of coarse canvas or byaz' called burmet'’, together with raw
cotton which they did not grow in sufficient quantities to supply the increasing needs
of their industry.
7
Several other, rather different, types of goods figured on the Khwarazmians'
shopping-list, such as the well-known Bukharan bows which Khwarazmian
merchants might later sell in Muscovy and which their khans might send as gifts to
the Tsars. Thus in 1619 one Khwarazmian took as many as eight Bukharan bows to
Kazan' as part of a consignment which included 27 pieces of byaz' and 6 caftans.
And in 1672 among the pominki which Anusha sent to the Tsar there were 18 bows
described in his letter as ‘special’ or ‘choice’ (khasa) and which the Tsar's translator

had no hesitation in calling “Bukharan’. Anusha also sent 9 amblers which his
ambassador described as Bukharan in his letter to the Tsar, and the ambassador
himself presented the Tsar with 300 lambskin pelts and 9 bows painted with gold
which the Tsar's official translator, once again, listed as Bukharan.*°
Finally Bukharan knives appear to have been purchased by Khwarazmians, for 9
of these knives figured among the pominki which were stolen from Abi ’1-Ghazi's

ambassador, Nazar Nadirlikov, near the Yaik in 1646.5!
4. Iran. Trade with Iran seems to have been lively and to have continued even at
times when official relations were strained to breaking point. Thus, even in 1594,
when Shah ‘Abbas was preparing for a second major campaign against ‘Abd alMu’ min, there were Bukharan merchants in Kashan. Shah ‘Abbas made the most of
this, arranging for the Muscovite

ambassador,

Zvenigorodskii,

to come

to his

audience via the main square of the town, hoping that the Bukharans trading there
would be impressed and ‘seized with fear’.>? In 1619 there were traders from
Bukhara and Samargqand in Isfahan, and Shah ‘Abbas summoned a number of them

46 Materialy, 168. TSGADA, fond 134, op.1, 1623 no.1, list 119. Pamyatniki, XXII, 644.
47 Materialy, 289.

48
49
50
51

Tbid., 317. Munshi Muhammad, 1063.
TsGADA, fond 134, op.1, 1668-70 no.1, list 28. Materialy, 334.
Pamyatniki, XXII, 642. Materialy, 433-4, 212-3.
Thid., 198.

52 Pamyatniki, XX, 257.

438

Trade with Asia

to his palace in the presence of the Spanish ambassador, hoping to obtain much
valuable information from them about the time taken to reach China from the khanate
and the route followed by the yearly Bukharan caravan.53
Bukharans and other traders were accommodated in Iran in a multitude of
Caravanserais, as were pilgrims and travellers. All caravanserais were built in a similar
way and, according to Bell, they were situated one day's journey apart.54 Chardin
writes that the ones situated in the towns were two storeys and about 20 feet high.
Those intended for merchants were not only more spacious and beautiful, they also
had close-fitting doors to every room. All were square, with a large pool in the middle

of the courtyard, 6 to 8 feet deep,>> and 20 to 30 feet in diameter. Each room was

windowless, 8 foot square, with a smaller anteroom, and there were stables at the
back which included cooking facilities and accommodation for the guests’ servants.
There was also a caretaker, who sold travellers their essential requirements in bread,
wine, butter, milk, fruit, poultry and firewood, but no bedding or cooking utensils
seem to have been provided. Accommodation in Iranian caravanserais was free for
travellers and pilgrims, but not for merchants. They paid a large entrance fee, plus a
minimal daily fee which trebled if the rooms were low-ceilinged and thus easier to
heat in cold weather, or if they were cool and consequently more comfortable in hot
weather. There was also a sales tax to pay which was charged per bale at a varying
rate according to the intrinsic value of the goods sold.5® Fryer's account of the
caravanserais of Isfahan is not entirely consistent, for he describes them as being 3-4
storeys high ‘with Walls and Galleries’ and also as having ‘up to two or three
storeys’. He adds that unlike those situated outside Isfahan which were of mud, the

“Caravan Sa Raw’ of the Iranian capital were made of brick and stone. There was a
separate one for each ‘country’ (province?) and it was large enough to accomodate a

whole ‘Caphalae’ (caravan).°7
The job of caretaker or porter in an Iranian caravanserai was no sinecure. He was
held responsible for any items stolen in his establishment, he had to ensure that the
sales agreed by his patrons went through and that the purchase price was paid in full.
A literate man, the caretaker was required to enter all the details of a sales agreement
in a ledger. His entry made the agreement binding and in return for his services he
received a 2 per cent commission on each transaction. The caretaker was also
expected, together with the guard provided, to ensure the personal safety of
merchants during their stay.
Other safeguards were provided for traders in Iran. An official price for goods
was established every week, weights and measures were controlled by the authorities,
and security on the roads was achieved by making local governors responsible for
any theft committed in their province. The rahdari who guarded the highways were
so efficient that thieves were nearly always quickly apprehended. Governors had little
difficulty, therefore, in getting back the goods stolen, but if the goods were not

53 Silva, II, 378.
54 Bell, Ispahan, 60.
55 Literally 6 to 8 feet high (‘haut de six 4 huit pieds’), which may of course mean that the sides of
the pool rose 6 to 8 feet above the floor of the courtyard .
56 Chardin, Voyages, I, 205-7. The daily fee was 1-2 sols per day, i.e. about 4-9.5 Bukharan dinars.
This is calculated on the basis that 1 tanga (i.e. 30 dinars) equalled between 1.4 and 1.6 shahi
between

1635 and 1647 (Burton, Bukharan trade, 87n.10) and 1 sbahi (1 chayé) equalled 4.5

sols (Chardin, Voyages, III, 127) in about 1674. Tavernier, Les six voyages, I, 446.

57 Fryer, II, 250; Il, 49.
439

Bukharan trade

recovered, the inhabitants of the local villages or town were made to pay for them.
When the goods, or the value of the goods, were retumed to the merchants a duty of
up to 20% was charged on them by the magistrates, and a further 25% had to be paid
to the governor and his officials.
Security on the roads continued to be enforced after the late 1660s, although the
recovery rate for stolen goods became more problematic. Chardin explains that this
resulted from the great number of robberies which took place towards the end of
‘Abbas II's reign.58 Chicanery was resorted to in order to delay payment of
compensation, in the hope that those merchants who lacked time, or patience, might
waive their claims in order to continue with their journey. In any case, although
robbers were still made to return the stolen goods to the authorities, restitution to the
merchants was likely to be only partial or non-existent, except for those who had
friends in high places.59 According to Fryer, who was there in the 1680s, the roads
were certainly safe, but there was a ‘general attempt by traders, bakers, artisans, to
cozen the stranger’, and he believed that this stemmed from the corruption of the
judiciary and the fact that judges bought their offices. Chardin also noted that bribery
was the usual way to deal with either judicial problems or Customs difficulties. 6°
Things had deteriorated since the days of ‘Abbas I when Richard Steel wrote
with approval that merchants were generally ‘used with great favour’ when they
entered Iran, because officials ‘feare lest complaints should be made to the king,
which will have Merchants kindly entreated’. Even then, however, merchants met
with some unpleasantness in Iran, for they were searched to the skin on leaving the
country, especially when they were on their way to India, the export of gold and
silver being forbidden on pain of death. The export of horses and slaves was also
prohibited, although, in this case the penalty was less severe.®! These prohibitions
must have seriously hampered the activities of Bukharan merchants, but they did not
stop the flow of goods to Iran and vice-versa.
The items which Bukharans took to Iran included local products as well as foreign
commodities purchased in trading expeditions to Siberia, China and India. Although it
is not possible, in the absence of records, to assess the quantities of local goods
exported to Iran it seems clear, from the numerous references to them found in the
works of Western travellers to Iran, that Bukharan plums and prunes had pride of
place. When Della Valle fell ill in Shiraz around 1622 he was prescribed a dish of
chicken with spinach and plums of various types, the majority of which were
Bukharan, and ‘di sapor gustissimo’. These prunes were also mentioned by Chardin
and Tavernier in the latter part of the seventeenth century. Chardin was in fact quite
enthusiastic about the produce of the khanate. He said that the fruit which he
encountered in Iran was the most beautiful and also the best in the world. He
described the ‘Alan Bocora’ (plums of Bukhara) as similar to the French plums of
Brignolles, but pleasanter and more effective. A mere half-dozen boiled in water made
‘une douce purgation’, he said, and with an added pinch of senna they acted as ‘une
médecine compléte’.©? Turning to melons he explained that although the ones from
Khurasan were considered the best in the world some people (some Iranians) did
58 He died in 1666.
59 Tavernier, Les six voyages, I, i, 446-7, 685, 686. Chardin, Voyages, III, 423-5. Fryer, III, 156.

60 Fryer, III, 117-8. Chardin, Voyages, II, 306; Ill, 346, 423.
61 Steel, 274-5, says ‘to take gold or coine of silver out of Persia, but the Kings, is death’.
62 Della Valle, Viaggi, Il, 320. Chardin, Voyages, II, 26. Tavernier, Les six voyages, I, 676.

440

Trade with Asia

prefer the ones from Balkh and other places in ‘Tartarie’. Interestingly enough he
added the onions of “Bactriane’ (Balkh?) to his list of fruit and said that the Iranians
served them as a curiosity, because they were as large and as sweet as apples.
Bukharan livestock was also sold to Iran. Chardin explained that the purchase of
horses was a privilege reserved to the Shah, although he did give some away when he
wanted to reward officials, craftsmen and others. The many ‘chevaux Tartares’ which
Chardin saw in Iran he described as lower, coarser and uglier than Iranian horses, but
sturdier, livelier and better at racing. He also came across the revahie, a racing camel
bred near “Tartarie’ which went ‘au grand trét et si vite qu'un cheval ne les peut
suivre qu'au galop’. And he was very much impressed by the Bactrian sheep, whose
fatty tails were so heavy, weighing in some cases over 15 kg, that shepherds were
known to put them on wheels in order to help the sheep pull them along.®4
Among the valuable raw materials which Bukharan merchants took to Iran one
can list lapis lazuli, raw silk, which was re-exported to Turkey and Germany, and
probably tobacco and hemp. So much lapis lazuli found its way there that according
to Chardin, although it came from ‘le pais des Yusbecs’, the largest quantities were
held in Iran, which was in effect its ‘magasin général’. In his account of Persia in
1660 Du Mans said similarly that ‘la pierre d'azur’ came there from Tartary and
Tavernier explained that it was widely used for painting carved ceilings and
panellings. He added that in the 1650s ‘Abbas II had banned its import as an
economy measure and tried to promote instead the local stone, a few seams of which
had been found in the Iranian copper mines. The Shah soon realised, however, that
this tarnished in the air, becoming ‘sombre & triste’ and even fading altogether.
Another drawback was its excessive flakiness which meant that it could not be used in
delicate miniature work. In view of all these problems ‘Abbas II had been obliged to
lift the embargo on ‘le vray azur qui vient de la grande Tartarie’, and imports from the
khanate had been resumed.
There is no concrete evidence about Bukharan imports of tobacco into Iran, but,

since it grew in the khanate and Bukharans took the Chinese variety to Siberia, they
may have taken some to Iran as well. As for hemp, Tavernier's allegation that
Bukharans introduced into Iran the nefarious practice of smoking its fluffy flower
seems to indicate that they were responsible for importing it into the country.®
Bukharans also carried manufactured goods from the khanate to Iran. In the late
seventeenth century perfume, paper and lambskin cloaks are known to have been
taken to the Muhammad Bik caravanserai in Isfahan by merchants from Samarqand,
Kirman and Mashhad. There is every reason to believe that the lambskin cloaks were
made of the famous Qarakil fleece, and that the paper originated in the khanate.
Indeed Chardin was dismissive of Iranian paper which he described as greyish, dirtylooking and floppy. He added that, although European paper was much used in Iran,
it was not thought of as highly as that which came from ‘la Petite Tartarie’. This
paper, which was produced in Balkh, Bukhara and Samargand, was made in a variety
of colours. ‘Ils en font de toutes les couleurs, exceptés de noir, & ils le marbrent ou le
font moucheté d'argent’, he wrote, and this is consistent with the evidence collected

63 Chardin, Voyages, III, 23, 26, 103. Mukminova, Ocherki, 195, also says Bukhara was famous

for its onions.

64 Chardin, Voyages, III, 33, 34, 36, 37.
65 Ibid., IJ, 116, 30; I, 121. Du Mans,

188. Tavernier, Les six voyages, I, 619. Ibid., 1676

edition, V, 646.

44]

Bukharan trade

by the Soviet historian Semenov who gives seven colours for the paper produced in
the seventeenth century, ranging from puce and dark blue to yellow, red and orange.
Chardin went on to explain that the most ‘noble’ variety was silvery white, by which
he may have meant the thick, high quality paper with a greeenish tinge which was
produced in Samarqand under ‘Abd al-‘Aziz, and which Semenov describes as nicely
glossed and very pleasant to the touch. This paper, according to Semenov, could be
made of silk, or a mixture of hemp and silk, or even of cotton, but Mukminova
disagrees with him and insists that it was made of pure hemp. She adds that the paper

was very strong, smooth, and above all non-porous.®
Other Bukharan manufactured goods which made their way to Iran included
carpets and saddles. Thus in 1590 a multicoloured Bukharan carpet with a green
fringe valued at 10 roubles was presented to Tsar Fedor on behalf of Shah “Abbas,
and Della Valle, who was in Iran in the early 1620s, gives a detailed description of the
special type of saddle called ‘uzbeghine’, which was used by most people, but
especially by the Iranian soldiers. These saddles had. several advantages: they were
strong, remarkably comfortable, unusually light, and also very easy to handle because
the harness was not attached to them. Moreover, their ‘fattura stravagante’ made them
‘rilevate e alte’ and, by lifting the rider high above the horse, gave him full freedom of

movement in every direction.§7

Bukharan merchants also took over a great variety of foreign goods. In the latter
part of the sixteenth century ‘Abdallah's good relations with Kuchum, coupled with
the laxity of Muscovite officials, enabled the merchants of the khanate to keep the
Iranian market supplied with Siberian sables and black foxes. So many, in fact, were
taken there that in January 1595 Shah ‘Abbas told Tsar Fedor's envoy,
Zvenigorodskii, that they were quite cheap in ‘Kizylbash’. Musk and rhubarb root
were also imported. Rhubarb was already popular in Herat in the first decade of the
sixteenth century, and 100 years later Bukharans were selling rhubarb to Iranian
merchants who then offered it for sale in Alexandria and Hormuz. This state of affairs
changed as soon as the Muscovite authorities got into the market, some time in the
1640s. The Swedish envoy, De Rodes, who was in Moscow

between

1650 and

1655, explained that when they realised how rare (and valuable) the root was they
decided to become the sole suppliers of rhubarb throughout the world. He added
disapprovingly that, in order to achieve this, Muscovite officials compelled
Bukharans to sell them their supply ‘at whatever price they wish(ed)’. However, they

seem to have failed in their endeavour, for in 1660 Du Mans noted that rhubarb,
together with senna, was taken to Mashhad by the ‘Yousbecks’ (people from the
khanate), and that (the quantities imported were such) that it was considered an

Iranian commodity.®8
But what of the goods which the Bukharans took back, or which the Armenian
merchants who, according to Tavernier, were in sole control of the Iranian trade,

carried to the khanate? The most complete source of information for this is
Jenkinson's report of 1558, which says that ‘Persians’ brought ‘Craska, woollen
cloth, linen cloth, silks, argomacks’ to Bukhara.©9
66Anon.,

description.

Keyvani,

236. Chardin,

Voyages,

II, 117,

149. Semenoy,

Sredneaziatskoi bumage", 4-5, 16-19, 9. Mukminova, Ocherki, 96, 99.

67 Pamyatniki, XX, 130. Della Valle, Viaggi, II, 239.
68 Pamyatniki, XX, 268. Varthema, 100. Kurts, "Sostoyanie", 153. Du Mans, 188, 367.
69 Jenkinson,"The Voyage", 473.

442

Trade with Asia

There was certainly a demand in the khanate for woollen and English cloth.
Bukharan merchants bought it in Muscovy and Siberia, it was mentioned among the
possessions of Nadir Muhammad's sons, and Muscovite ambassadors distributed it
to khans and officials in order to secure their goodwill. And since woollen cloth was
readily available in Iran because of the close links which existed between the
Muscovy Company and the shahs, Bukharan merchants would have made a point of

taking some back.7°

Iranian silk was pufchased both for the khanate and for resale in Siberia. Turbans
from Herat and silk sashes from Kashan and Yazd reached the khanate in such
quantities that Nadir Muhammad was able to include a number among his gifts to
Prince Dara Shikuh in 1639. Bukharans are also known to have sold Farhabad silk in
Tobol'sk in 1653, 1662 and 1666. Two measures must have therefore affected them
seriously, namely the prohibition relating to the export of several types of materials
from Yazd which was issued by Shah Sulaimanin in 1666, and the decision by Tsar
Aleksei in 1667 to grant an Armenian company the monopoly for importing Iranian

silk into Muscovy.7!
As for Iranian horses, they were so highly prized by the khans
Muhammad took advantage of a temporary improvement in relations in
order to write and ask for two Tubchaq horses. Similarly Nadir Muhammad
piebald horses in late 1624, and was presented with an ‘‘Iraqi’ horse by his

that Baqi
1601-2 in
asked for
brother in

1639.72 These were probably expensive pedigree horses, for the ‘argomack’, which
Jenkinson listed among Iranian imports to Bukhara, is described by Khanykov as a
tall, statuesque animal with a proud bearing, a long neck, thin legs and shiny coat.
Khanykov added that it needed much care and could neither cope with a long

campaign, nor cross the Qirghiz steppes and find its own food.73
No direct information is available concerning the goods which Iranians bought in
Bukhara. We can only surmise that, as in 1558, those merchants who got to the
khanate continued to take back ‘redde hides with other Russian wares and slaves

which are of divers countries’, all of which continued to be plentiful in the khanate.74
5. Mughal India. The Bukharo-Mughal trade was undertaken by people of all
classes. The Emperors sent trading agents regularly to the khanate. The khans appear
to have been interested in encouraging such commercial links. The Juibari and other
religious leaders were also involved, as were major officials such as Yalangtish and
many ordinary citizens of both countries, but there is little detailed information
available about the activities of individual merchants.
The caravanserais of India were very large. They generally accommodated

between 800 and 1,000 people with their horses, camels and carts, but Manucci, who
was in India during the second part of the seventeenth century, says that some were
even larger, with trees inside the courtyard and separate accomodation for the staff of
70 See Ziyaev, Ekonomicheskie svyazi, 65 for Bukharans taking cloth from Tobol'sk to Tara, and
thence to the khanate in 1645 and 1654. Materialy, 366-7, 185. Mahmud b.Wali (Ethé), 253b.
TsGADA,

fond

134, op.1,

1641

no.2,

listy

156-7.

"Nakaz",

76-77.

Russko-indiiskie

otnosheniya, 229-30.

71 Mahmid b.Wali (Ethé), 272a. Ziyaev, Ekonomicheskie svyazi, 53. Steel, 276. Shpakovskii, 26.

72 Iskandar Beg, 612. Abia ’1-Qasim, Nuskhat, 241b. Mahmid b.Wali (Ethé), 257a. N.B. ‘Iraq was a
term then used to indicate Iran or at least the part of Iran known to the ancients as Media.
73 Khanykov, Opisanie, 155.
74 Jenkinson, "The Voyage", 473.

443

Bukharan trade

the sarais. They were built of stone or brick and looked ‘like fortified places with their
bastions and strong gates’. Steel, who was there in 1615-6, wrote that these “very
faire’ buildings had been erected by ‘the King’ or by some great men, ‘for the
beautifying of the way, the memory of their names and the entertainment of
Travellers’. Manucci noted that their gates closed ‘at the going down of the sun’ and
opened again at 6 a.m, and that travellers were always warned when the opening was
imminent, for this was their chance to report any missing goods. When they had done
so, a thorough search was instituted and the sarai remained closed until the items were
found. Then thieves caught red-handed were dealt with summarily and strung up
outside the building.
There is little consensus of opinion about the time of day when travellers set off
from the caravanserais. Steel and Manucci both held that they did so at daybreak, but
Tavernier and Fryer wrote that people only travelled at night. Tavernier explained that
journeys were begun at nightfall in order to avoid the heat. Fryer went so far as to
deny the existence of the caravanserais altogether. There were no ‘Inns to shut (the
travellers) in a-night’, he said, ‘for then is their time of travelling’. In his experience
travellers who wished to rest had to do so ‘in the shade of a tree or a tomb...or a shed
in which a Customer (Customs official) keeps a Watch to take Custom’.75
Travel arrangements in India were very different from those in Iran. Goods were
not loaded on donkeys, mules or horses as in Iran, but mainly on oxen or on carts
drawn by oxen. According to Tavernier camels were used only for transporting the
belongings of nobles, but this conflicts with the information gathered by other
seventeenth-century travellers. Fryer wrote of “Caphalae of Oxen, Camels, Bufaloes,
with heavy Waggons drawn by teams of Oxen, yok'd Eight, sometimes a Dozen or
Sixteen times double.’ Manucci said that the fruit of the khanate was transported on

camels, and Steel mentioned that camels were hired at Qandahar for the journey to
India.
Although it seems from Fryer's account that caravans comprised a variety of
pack-animals, including oxen, as well as ox-drawn carts, Tavernier made a distinction
between the caravans of oxen, which could number as many as ten or twelve
thousand oxen, and the caravans of carts which could number between one and two
hundred carts, each cart being drawn by 10 to 12 oxen. Tavernier added that an ox
could carry between 300 and 350 lb for 60 days and that he covered 12 to 15 leagues
per day, his food requirements being two or three loaves of bread made of wheat,

butter and black sugar in the daytime, plus a ration of well-soaked chick-peas at night.
The ox drovers travelled with their wives and families, and each cart was guarded by
4 soldiers hired by the merchants. Like Tavernier, Fryer-remarked on the tight
security needed on the roads in India. He deplored the fact that travellers could not set
off freely at all seasons, as in Iran, and he explained that they were obliged to
“observe set times, and move with a good Force, both to defend them from their own

Armies, and the Insults of Outlaws’.76
Merchants were treated very differently in Mughal India during the reign of the
various Emperors. Akbar, for example, was so interested in the idea of commerce that
he had mock trading sessions in special Court markets and recruited foreign master
75 Fryer, II, 156, must have been referring to the lack of caravanserais inside Indian towns, also

mentioned by Chardin (Voyages, I, 205-6).

76 Tavernier, Les six voyages, I, 26-31. Manucci, Storia, I, 38. Manucci. A Pepys, 34. Steel,
272-3. Fryer, II, 156.

444

Trade with Asia

craftsmen as instructors for his people. The quality of the carpets manufactured in his
Court factories improved to such an extent as a result of his encouragement that,
according to Noér, his subjects began to purchase them in preference to the carpets
which were imported from Turan (the Persian word generally used to indicate the
khanate) and Iran.77 Akbar also gave audiences to merchants, and in order to
encourage their activities he fought to keep open all the routes leading to India, as well
as all internal trade routes. He provided many new roads to Agra, he widened others
to facilitate caravan travel, and he built a series of luxurious caravanserais between
Lahore and Agra within half a day's journey of each other. Other measures more
closely connected with commerce included the dismissal, in October 1582, of all the

officials in charge because they had proved greedy and self-seeking, and they had
oppressed the merchants, interfered with their activities and no doubt caused them
losses. In their place he appointed 21 new officials to regulate the 21 branches of
commerce. These men were carefully chosen for their quick wit, their honesty and
their integrity, honesty being vital, because they set the sale price of all goods and
were separately responsible for such items as horses, dyes, gold brocade, aromatic
herbs, fruit and sweetmeats, gold and silver. And in order to ensure that they did not
succumb to temptation he made it known that a third of the 1.5 per cent transaction tax
which they collected on behalf of the Treasury, ie., the 0.5 per cent paid by

purchasers, would be used to cover their wages.78
There were several other taxes to pay which applied to traders in general and
Bukharans in particular. They were as follows: a personal travel tax (tamgha) paid by
road users, an income tax of 2.5 per cent (zakat) payable by merchants and travellers,
a precursor of the VAT called hasil which traders paid on their profits, port dues of
2.5 per cent which will have affected Bukharans trading in Cambay, and transit dues
(rahdari) of 2.5 per cent. The rahdari was paid on crossing from one province to
another and must have been particularly burden, for it increased with the distance
travelled. There was also a tax on ferries which Akbar abolished temporarily in 1595,
but this was very low, as little as 1 rupee being charged for taking 800 kg a distance

of 5 miles.7?
Jahangir was even more conscious than his father of the importance of trade. He
carefully lists in his autobiography all the measures introduced during his reign in
order to improve the lot of traders, three of which were adopted straight after his
accession. Firstly, he abolished the port dues (mir bahri) which ‘were used by local
jagirdar (fief-holders) for their own profit’. Secondly, he abolished the levy of the
tamgha and, in order to ensure the safety and comfort of merchants, he gave orders
for caravanserais, furnished with mosques and wells, to be erected in deserted places

where robberies had occurred in the past. Thirdly, he forbade Customs officials to
open a merchant's bales without obtaining his prior permission. Other measures
related more particularly to the area of Kabul and were aimed at encouraging foreign
trade. Dues on many manufactured goods were repealed in Kabul, although they
provided the Treasury with a yearly income of over 250 million rupees. Similar action
was taken with regard to the zakat which was abolished, although it brought in a
substantial revenue and was the main source of income from the provinces of Kabul

77 Antonova, Ocherki, 117. Noér, II, 269.
78 Antonova, Ocherki, 119-20. Abu ’I-Fadl, Akbarndma, III, 396.

79 Aba ’I-Muzaffar, 4, 21. Sarkar, Studies, 161. Noer, Il, 281. Aba ’I-Fadl, Akbarnama, Ill, 13,
670-1. Antonova, Ocherki, 117-121.

445

Bukharan trade

and Qandahar, where it was taken from foreigners as a sort of Customs duty. The
repeal of the zakat seems to have been aimed directly at the merchants of Iran and the
khanate, for Jahangir took the trouble to add that it ‘brought much benefit to the
people of Iran and Turan’, but the repeal of the tax on manufactured goods in Kabul

must have also helped these merchants.8°
Although Shah Jahan was also interested in trade, his interest was purely
personal. He sent many commercial agents of his own to the khanate, but did nothing
to help ordinary merchants. On the contrary, he seems to have re-introduced and even
increased nearly all the taxes abolished by his father. The onerous payments of zakat
at 2.5 per cent are said to have caused merchants and travellers much distress in his
reign. The rate of the hasil was increased to such an extent that according to a
contemporary writer ‘tradesmen and merchants gave up trade and householders fled’.
As for the transit tolls (rahdari), they went up to 10 per cent of the value of all goods
and became payable, not only at each provincial boundary, as before, but also at ‘at
every ford, ferry and hill pass’, in order to cover the wages of the guards who
patrolled the roads. Other exactions were the pandari paid on all food and drink
brought into Agra, Delhi, Lahore and Burhanpur, and the exceptionally high tolls of
25 altyn or 2.6 rupees per pud payable at Attock,8! which were mentioned by Gribov
in 1646. Traders were also liable to the gushti paid on their pack animals, and to two
other taxes, the 2.5 per cent chihilyak and the 16.6 per cent danak (one in six), from
which only Shah Jahan's agents were exempt.82
Aurangzib was more supportive of trade than his father. He not only sent personal
agents to the khanate to buy goods, he also repealed most of Shah Jahan's damaging
measures. By 1663 he had abolished the hasil and done away with the zakat, the
rahdari and the pandari on government-held lands. He requested fief-holders to
follow his example and mentioned these reforms in a letter to the Shah as proof of his

concern for merchants, travellers and craftsmen.83 And indeed, if we are to believe
the contemporary writer Shihab al-Din, the Emperor thereby brought much relief to
villagers, as well as travellers, although he deprived his own Treasury of a sum equal
to the total income of Ma wara’ al-nahr. Another measure which particularly favoured
traders was the abolition of the 2.5 per cent sales tax in 1667. This abolition,
however, only applied to Muslim traders and, although it must have been welcomed
by Bukharans, the Hindu merchants had little cause to rejoice. They were still
expected to pay the tax, and at the discriminatory rate of 5 per cent, which Aurangzib
had imposed upon them two years earlier in the hope that they would abandon their
own religion and embrace Islam.*4
However, despite Shihab al-Din's glowing account of Aurangzib's concessions to
traders, it should not be imagined that foreign visitors paid no taxes during his reign.
Tavernier wrote that all merchants, apart from those belonging to the English or Dutch
East India Companies were searched on arrival and made to pay up to 4 or 5 per cent
80 Aba ’1-Muzaffar, 4, 21-22.
81 See Burton, Bukharan trade, 89, for the estimated value of the rouble against the rupee.

82 Sarkar, Studies, 161-2. Sarkar, Aurangzib, III, 88-89. TSGADA, fond 77, op.2, 1646 no.2, list
76. Nizamutdinov, /z istorii sredneaziatsko-indiiskikh otnoshenii, 49. No explanation has been
found for the application of the last two taxes.

83 Sarkar, Studies, 162. Sarkar, Aurangzib, Il, 89, 313. CHI, IV, 231. Riazul Islam, A Calendar,
I, 453.
84 See Sarkar, Studies, 162, for the losses to the Treasury as per Shihab al-Din Talish. CHI, IV,

242-3,

446

Trade with Asia

on the value of their goods. And tax was certainly paid on all the silver and gold
imported. Tavernier explains that gold and silver coins were confiscated at the frontier
and re-minted into local coins, at which stage a toll was paid. However, he is not
clear about the toll payable for, although he originally gives a figure of 2 per cent, he
later suggests that it was 5%, because the penalty for hiding bullion at the frontier was
10 per cent, or ‘twice the tax rate’. An even higher rate was demanded from
merchants who wished to pay in coins that were 3 or 4 years old, for these coins were
held to have lost part of their value. It is not known to what extent this tax affected
Bukharan merchants, but according to Tavernier their English counterparts tried to
avoid paying it by hiding their gold and silver inside their wigs.85
Another measure much resented by traders was the introduction of a new ruling,
shortly before 1665, whereby merchants bringing precious stones to sell at Court had
to show them to the Emperor's assessors on their arrival into the country. The two
Persians and one Bamian appointed for this task examined the stones, checked them
for defects or counterfeiting, taxed them, and then asked to be given the best
specimens for the Emperor at half their value. If the merchant refused, they penalized
him by valueing the remainder of his stock at as little as 50% of the market value, but
even if he accepted their demands he was bound to lose money. There were two
reasons for this, according to Tavernier. On the one hand the Bamians invariably gave
a low valuation on precious stones which then had to be sold at that rate. On the other
hand the Emperor's courtiers refused to buy any gems which had been seen (and
rejected) by the Emperor.
Having paid the import tax and the separate tax on silver, gold and precious
stones, merchants were free to sell their goods, but whenever a sale took place they
had to pay a commission of 1 to 2 per cent to a broker. Brokers were a national
institution. They supervised all commercial transactions and ensured that the agreed
price was paid by the purchaser. Tavernier explained: -“C'est la coitume dans toute
l'Asie qu'il ne se vend rien qu'un Courtier ne soit present, et chaque marchandise a le
sien a part’. An additional problem in Mughal India was the arbitrary devaluation of
all but the latest issue of coins, on the assumption that they would have lost some of
their metal content through use. This was particularly resented by European
merchants such as Tavernier. He explained with distaste that a coin lost 0.25 per cent
of its value in the first two years, and as much as 4 per cent of its original value by the

time it was 10-20 years old. This practice, however, is unlikely to have shocked
Bukharans. They were familiar with the notion that older coins might be given an
artifically lower value, and they must have been thankful that the Indian rate of
depreciation was less than the one adopted in the khanate. For them, and also for the
merchants who found the officially enforced depreciation of coins confusing, one
beneficial aspect of Aurangzib's rule was the fact that there were virtually no forged
coins in the marketplace. This was because, in accordance with the rules of the
85 Tavernier, Les six voyages, Il, 5-8. Hameeda, 42-44, believes that Central Asian and Iranian
merchants took bullion to India and stopped doing so in the eighteenth century because the
shortage of bullion in India around 1750 apparently coincided with a decrease in the flow of trade
through Kabul. According to Majumdar, IV, 730, silver and gold were imported into India under
Akbar and Jahangir, but this appears to have stopped after the reign of Jahangir in view of the lack
of silver extraction in the khanate (TsGADA,

fond 109, op.1, kn.1, list 54a.) and the coinage

problems experienced by Imam Quli and his successors. It seems far more likely, as suggested by
Professor Irfan Habib of Aligarh, that the horses bought from the khanate in the days of Akbar
and Aurangzib were paid for in bullion, and it is known that at least in the late eighteenth century
gold and silver were imported into the khanate from India. Efremov, 139.

447

Bukharan trade

shari‘a, convicted forgers had one hand cut off at the wrist.86
Some of the goods which Bukharans supplied to India came from Muscovy,
China and Persia, such as the Muscovite red hides which they are known to have

taken there in 1558 and 1661-2, and which they still carried, at least as far as Kabul,
in the late eighteenth century. Silks, beaver and otter pelts, Siberian or Qalmaq musk
and Chinese porcelain are also likely to have figured in their consignments of goods,
since there was a demand for them which the Bukharan rulers and their ambassadors
tried to satisfy. More than one ambassador took over small quantities of fur, either as
pelts, or even made up into collars, as in 1681. And Chinese porcelain was highly
valued by Akbar and Jahangir, both of whom are said to have imported it, together
with glassware. No doubt such items were still much appreciated in India in 1639 for
when Nadir Muhammad was trying to restore good relations with Shah Jahan after
the abortive Mughal invasion of the khanate he sent over with his ambassador a
number of crystal vases and porcelain dishes from Costes together with silk sashes
from Kashan and Yazd.87
However, the bulk of the goods came from the khanate, two main categories
being livestock and fruit. The livestock, which Van Klenk describes as ‘cattle’,
consisted mainly of camels and horses, all of which were highly prized in India, so
much so that both Shah Jahan and Aurangzib sent special agents to the khanate to
purchase suitable animals on their behalf.88 The camels were long-haired and very
strong, and the horses were sought after because of their courage in war, their

hardiness and their faithfulness to their masters.8? The Emperors took large quantities
of these horses for their own use, there being 12,000 from Iran and Turan in Akbar's
stables. The numbers imported increased considerably under Aurangzib. According to
Manucci, as many as 100,000 horses were imported yearly into the country from
Balkh, Bukhara and Kabul, of which 12,000 were purchased by the Emperor.
Manucci explains that Aurangzib's Treasury benefited greatly because 25 per cent of
the value of these horses had to be paid to Customs officials on the Indus. The size of
this import tax probably acted as a deterrent for ordinary merchants who did not
benefit from the exemptions granted to official envoys. However, they could sell their
horses before reaching the Indus, and according to Tavernier, the majority did so in
Kabul. This had two main advantages. Firstly, the horses could be fattened on the
rich local pastures, as was the case in the eighteenth century, when horses were
‘brought into condition’ there before appearing on the Indian market. Secondly,
merchants who sold their horses in Kabul could avoid the extra travelling expenses,
as well as the import tax, which would then be paid by Indian merchants. However, it
is difficult to believe that Bukharans sold off as many as 60,000 every year in Kabul
and left only some 2,500 to take to India, as suggested by Tavernier. His figures are
not as reliable as those given by Manucci, for Tavernier spent far less time in India
and did not travel extensively during his stay, whereas Manucci lived in and around

India for over 60 years. 9°
86 Tavernier, Les six voyages, II, 93, 133, 18-19.

87 Jenkinson, "The Voyage", 472. Manucci, II, 39. Saqi, 216. Majumdar, IV, 730. Mahmidb. Wali

(Ethé), 272a. See Efremov, 143, for porcelain as an item carried by Bukharans in the eighteenth
century.

88 Van Klenk, 441. Nizamutdinov, Iz istorii sredneaziatsko-indiiskikh otnoshenii, 49. Shaikh Aba
’| Fath, Lahore edition, 617-9.

89 Manucci, Storia, II, 38-39, 391.
90 Abii *I-Fadl, ‘Ain, 132. Manucci, Storia, I, 390-1. Elphinstone, 387. Tavernier, "Letter", 63.

448

Trade with Asia

To return to the 25 per cent toll on the Indus, this may not have been such a
serious drawback after all, for the Emperors paid very generously for the horses they
purchased. Akbar, for example, paid 50 per cent more than the market value and
according to Tavernier Aurangzib paid between 3,000 and 10,000 écus for his
horses, i.e., 6,000 to 20,000 rupees or between 27,00 and 90,000 tanga.?!
Merchants may have therefore thought it worthwhile to pay the toll on any high
quality steeds likely to appeal to the Emperor.
Other types of livestock carried by ordinary merchants may have included hawks
and falcons, for hunting-birds were much sought after and some were generally

presented to the Emperors by the khans' ambassadors.92
The fruit of Ma wara’ al-nahr was very popular in India, for it was generally held
to be better than its Indian equivalent. Under Akbar the melons, grapes and apples of
Samarqand reached India between September and March, and the melons from
Badakhshan arrived there in November and December.93 The import of such goods
increased under Jahangir. Items such as grapes from Badakhshan and melons from
Kariz are mentioned in his autobiography, and in 1616 he expressed his regret that the
Kariz melons and the grapes of Samarqand had not been imported in his father's
reign, for they would have ‘gladdened him’. Such was Jahangir's high opinion of the
fruit of the khanate that his nobles took to presenting some to him every year and he
kept a careful record of each such gift, declaring in autumn 1619 that the apples of
Samarqand were incomparable with regard to sweetness and softness.
Fruit continued to be imported during the reigns of Shah Jahan and Aurangzib.
Musk melons from Balkh, and Samarqand apples and pears, reached Shah Jahan's
Court in such quantities that he was able to distribute some daily to his courtiers.94
Under Aurangzib fresh pears, melons, apples and grapes arrived in Delhi almost
throughout the whole of the winter, to be consumed locally despite their very high
prices. Tavernier, who reported on the state of the Indian market in a letter addressed

to Louis XIV's famous minister of Finance, Colbert, thought that Mughal India was
in need of this fruit. He said that it came from Samarqand, Balkh, Bukhara and
Persia, as did the prunes, apricots and raisins, the almonds, pistachio and other nuts
which were available there all the year round. So successful was the fruit of the
khanate that, according to Chardin, there was even a market in Agra for melon seeds
from ‘Tartarie’. These seeds could be used for seven years, he explained, but no
longer, because after that the fruit would lose its flavour. The fruit of the khanate is

also mentioned by Manucci who says it came from Balkh, Bukhara and Kabul on
many camels. He writes of ‘melons, pears, seedless pomegranates, raisins and other
dried fruits’, which is particularly interesting, both because the art of drying melons
seems to have been a speciality of the khanate, and because vast quantities of
pomegranates did in fact grow in the Jalalabad area. Either the Indians did not know

Tavernier, Les six voyages, II, 63.
91 Aba ’1-Fadl, ‘Ain, 133. Manucci, Storia, 391. According to Tavernier (Les six voyages, 1810
edition, V, 45) 30 sols=1 rupee and there were 60 sols in 1 écu (Les six voyages, 1715 edition, I,
135). See Burton, Bukharan trade, 87n.6, for the relative values of the tanga and the écu.
92 See Lahauri (I, ii, 88-89) for a particularly wide variety of hunting-birds presented on behalf of

Nadir Muhammad in 1639. See also above, pass.

93 Aba ’1-Fadl, ’Ain, 65.
94 Aba ’1-Muzaffar,

173, 277. Gladwin, 44. Nizamutdinov,

otnoshenii, 49.

449

Iz istorii sredneaziatsko-indiiskikh

Bukharan trade

how to dry their own pomegranates, or else Mahmid b. Wali was right to describe
those from the khanate as superior in taste, and those of Jalalabad, which in his day
were taken all over India, as juicy but tasteless. Bukharans even supplied India with
rhubarb because, although the rhubarb of nearby Bhutan was excellent, it travelled

badly and could not withstand the damp.%>
Among other articles taken to India there were Bukharan carpets, even after Akbar
improved the quality of Indian carpets in order to discourage imports. Zedoar and
Badakhshan spinels were carried, at least as far as Kabul, and musk, beaver and other

hides are known to have reached Delhi with the personnel of the embassy of 1661
who quickly managed to dispose of them. Bukharan merchants are also likely to
have imported slaves and rare books, for such items were regularly found among the
gifts presented to the Emperors by ordinary travellers, emissaries from the khans and
representatives of the Bukharan clerics. The slaves might have originated in the
Qalmag uluses, in Muscovy, or even in the khanate, for it is known that there were

Muscovite slaves in India of whom at least one had been sent over from Bukhara, and
in 1661 the suite of an ambassador from the khanate sold “Tartar and Uzback women’
during their stay in India.%7 It is more doubtful whether bullion as such was taken to
India by Bukharans, as claimed by a modern historian, for Mulla Farrukh explained
in 1671 that, although there was a lot of silver ore in the khanate, there was not much
organised extraction.%8
The goods taken back from India fell into four main categories, namely materials, dyes, spices, and also gold, silver and gems.
A wide range of materials was carried. Such large quantities of turbans were
purchased that in 1639 Nadir Muhammad was able to present some 3,000 of his
subjects with coloured mandil from Benares. He is also known to have distributed
coloured muslin turbans and qutnya from Deccan, as well as turbans which probably
came from Lahore.9? According to Hameeda Naqvi Patna and Bihar cottons were
purchased by Central Asians, together with low-priced chintzes (chit) from Lahore.
And there must have been a considerable demand in the khanate for qumash and
Indian ready-made robes, if Shah Jahan thought that it was worthwhile sending over
600 pieces of qumash in 1639, and Aurangzib despatched 105 robes in 1670.100
Silk was also purchased in India. Tavernier claims that the merchants of ‘Tartarie’
bought as much per year as the Dutch, i.e., between 6,000 and 7,000 bales weighing
100 lb apiece. Mulla Farrukh declared that ‘ornate, expensive’ goods reached the
khanate from India, by which he seems to have meant gold brocade and other rich
95 Tavernier, "Letter", 63. Chardin, Voyages, III, 23. Manucci, II, 391. Mahmid b. Wali, More
tain, 35. According to Hagemeister (18) the melons of Ispahan, Bukhara and Andijan were the
best to be found in Western Asia in the 1830s and those of Bukhara alone were preserved by
drying. Tavernier, "Observations", 131, 134.

96 Noér, II, 269. Manucci, Storia, Il, 426, 39.
97 Abi ’l-Muzaffar, 79. Shaikh Abi ’| Fath, Lahore ed., 630. See TSGADA, fond 134, op.1, 168991 kn.3, listy 37a-b, about Petrushka Trenogin's captivity in India. Materialy, 287-8. Manucci,
Storia, Il, 42.

98 Hameeda, 42-44. TsSGADA, fond 109, op.1, 1669-75 kn.1, list 54a.
99 Mahmid b. Wali (Ethé), 254b-Sa. The exact origin of the turbans is not specified here, they are
merely said to be ‘from India’ but legal documents of the late sixteenth century reveal that
turbans from Lahore and Benares could then be found in Samarqand. Fitrat, Kaziiskie
dokumenty, nos. 11, 57.

100 Hameeda, 45, 101, 122-3, 187. Mahmiid b. Wali (Ethé), 272a. Saqi, 97.
450

Trade with Asia

materials such as ‘ob'yar’ (silk patterned with gold and silver) and zarbaft.101
Indigo, probably the most important dye on the Bukharans' shopping list, also
came from India. It was used extensively for dyeing materials and for producing the
blue yarn later exported to Muscovy and Siberia, as well as the dark blue material
worn by mourners in the khanate. It was less popular, however, when it came to
dyeing paper, for it made it brittle. Indigo was also re-exported as such to Muscovy,
and large enough quantities must have reached the khanate if ‘Abdallah II could send
over 655 kg there in 1585 with his ambassador, Muhammad ‘Ali, and if individual
merchants could take nearly 213 kg to Kazan' in 1619. The exact origin of these
consignments is not known but, according to William Finch, the indigo of Amedipore
near Agra was taken to Samarqand in 1611. Some more was probably purchased near
Cambay, for one of the best producing areas was situated nearby and Bukharan

merchants are known to have visited this port, if only in the days of Akbar. !02
Cinnamon also got to the khanate from India, as well as silver, gold and precious
metals. Tavernier noted that ducats engraved with a ruler's head were sold to the
merchants of Tartary for decorating women's headdresses, and Mulla Farrukh said
that his fellow-countrymen brought back precious stones and pearls from India.
Other items which Bukharan may well have taken back were sugar, candy and
medicinal herbs, as in the days of Babur, together with Indian tents. Richly-decorated
Indian tents were highly valued in the khanate, and it seems likely that the tents which
Nadir Muhammad presented to his brother and to Tsar Mikhail in 1639 and 1643
came from India, as did the one in red mitkal', lined with patterned vyboika and
covered with appliqué flowers, which ‘Abdallah II sent to Tsar Fedor in 1585.14
Finally, on their way back from India, Bukharans must have purchased white
falcons at Kabul, as well as slaves. Afghan and Hindu slaves were already plentiful in
the khanate in the late sixteenth century. They were much more numerous there after
the disastrous Mughal retreat of 1647 when, according to Gribov's informant, one
could purchase an Indian slave for 5 to 6 roubles or even less, and the campaigns
fought by the various Emperors must have ensured that a steady supply of slaves was

always available for merchants.
10%
Indian merchants dealt in similar goods to the ones carried by Bukharans.
Although Jenkinson only mentions ‘fine whites’ used for turbans, and other whites,
among the materials which they imported into Bukhara in 1558, from a lawsuit
involving two Multanis in Samargand in 1589-90 it is known that they also dealt in
such items as chit, rose-patterned material, coarse fata made of hair, prayer-book
covers, carpet-bags, white turbans from Lahore and richly-decorated robes. The
Indian merchants who settled in the khanate appear to have dealt in a wide range of
goods. Galerkina mentions precious stones, combed cotton, perfumes, dyes and gold
thread, and it is known that they also engaged in moneylending. Some of them indeed

101 Tavernier, "Observations", 127. TSGADA, fond 109, op.1, 1669-75 kn.1, list 53b.

102 pamyatniki, XXII, 276, 640, 643. Materialy, 109, 346-7, 98. Mukminova, "Kostyum", 76.
Semenov, O sredneaziatskoi bumage, 17. Finch, 69. Tavernier, Les six voyages, II, 46. Van
Linschoten, 61. Abu ’I-Fadl, Akbarnama, Ill, 13.

103 Tavernier, Les six voyages, II, 10. TSGADA, fond 109, op.1, 1669-75 kn.1, list 53b.

104 Majumdar, IV, 730. Materialy, 153, 98. Mahmad b. Wali (Ethé), 255a. Yuldashev, K istorii
torgovykh i posol'skikh svyazei, 48.
105 Fitrat, Kaziiski dokumentye, nos. 2, 14, 16, 21. Muhammad Yusuf Munshi, 265a. TSGADA,

fond 77, op.2, 1646 no.2, list 38.

451

Bukharan trade

financed the work of local craftsmen and penalised them heavily if goods were not
delivered on time.!°6 Sadly no information has come to light about the goods which
Indian merchants might have taken back from the khanate. However, it seems likely
that they continued to carry red hides, ‘wrought silkes’, slaves and horses as in the
days of Jenkinson. And they may well have purchased Chinese porcelain, glasses,
‘luxury objects’(?), woollens, gold and silver, for, according to Majumdar, these
were the sort of articles which reached India from Central Asia under Akbar and
Jahangir.
107

6. China. Although their route to China was likely to be interrupted by wars,
such as the Qazaq-Qalmaq war of 1555-8 and the various Qalmaq internecine
conflicts, Bukharans generally had little difficulty in getting there. The same
merchants travelled to and fro regularly, as le pére Avril found out from a man who
had done the round trip four times. And, although only one official trade caravan
might travel to China from Siberia or Bukhara in the course of a year, from the
evidence gathered by Danish exiles in 1666, it seems that many Bukharans completed

the journey twice every year.!®
Trading in frontier towns such as Su chou apparently presented no problem, but if
merchants wanted to get to Beijing they had to pass themselves off as ambassadors
who had come to bring the Great Can a tribute from.one of his ‘vassals’. This
deception was well-known to travellers. It had been practised ever since Roman times
and the Emperors and their circle were aware of it, but they took the merchants at their
word. They did so for two reasons. On the one hand, the arrival of numerous tributebearing ‘embassies’ supported the Emperors’ boast that they ruled the world. On the
other hand, by permitting these ‘embassies’ to reach Beijing the Emperors could take
their pick of all the foreign goods which reached the country.10
The Chinese authorities even issued rules regarding the goods which would be
acceptable as tribute. According to Trigautio's account of Goés's journey to
Kashghariya a total of 72 people from 7 or 8 western kingdoms were permitted to
enter Beijing every 6 years in their capacity as ambassadors. They were expected to
present the Emperor with a certain amount of ‘translucent marble’ (jade) from

Kashghariya, “ultramarine’ (lapis lazuli), small diamonds and other items.!!9 The
Jesuit Alvarez Semmedo, who was in China in 1640, disagreed with Trigautio, at
least with regard to the embassies of the Muslim kings. He wrote that a small
embassy bearing small gifts was permitted every three years and that every five years
a large embassy took over ‘big‘ (important) gifts. When they reached China at
‘Sucheu’ (Su chou) 40 or 50 merchants, who had earlier paid 120 ducats each to the
captain of the caravan, would be entered on the list of names sent to Beijing and
would accompany the ambassadors of the five kings of Turkey, Arabia, Camul
(Hami), Samarqand and Turfan to the capital. When the party got to Beijing they

would present the Emperor with a selection of presents which included 1000 cattes
106 Jenkinson, "The Voyage", 472. Fitrat, Kaziiski dokumentye, nos. 57, 58. Galerkina, 108.
Muhammad Yusuf Munshi, 151b. Mukminova, "Skupshchiki", 155-6.

107 Jenkinson, "The Voyage", 472. Majumdar, IV, 730.
108 Jenkinson, "The Voyage", 473. Avril, 86. Silva, 378. Anon. Beschreibung, 22.
109 Yule, I, CCI; IV, 235, 242-3. Fletcher J .F., "China", 208.

110 Yule, IV, 242. Bretschneider, "Chinese Intercourse", 127, 181, says that in the reign of Wan-li

(1573-1610) ‘it had been settled that tribute should be sent from Sa-ma-r-han only once in five
years’ and that no more than 25 people were allowed.

452

Trade with Asia

(39 arrobas) of jade of which a third would have to be of top quality, together with
340 horses, 300 tiny diamonds, 12 cattes of fine lapis lazuli, 600 knives and 600

files.111

No confirmation of these quantities has been found in the official Chinese
sources, for they only mention tributes of ‘horses and other goods’ and only list the
missions from Samarqand which entered Beijing every 5 years. However, Chinese
officials complained that Samarqandis managed to get round this rule and came in
more often than expected, and this would probably account for what Semmedo calls
the ‘small’ embassies. In the individual petitions from envoys of the ‘King of
Samarqand’ which Amyot translated, and which Bretschneider places in the 15th
century, many of the items listed by Semmedo are included, albeit in smaller
quantities. It seems likely, therefore, that each merchant or ambassador presented the
Emperor with a small part of the total consignment. Thus one envoy delivered 4
horses, another presented the Emperor with 6 horses and 100 small knives, yet
another brought horses and diamonds. Others brought 25 kg of jade apiece, adding 2

camels, or 500 knives, to their offering.!12
Although access to Beijing became easier after K'ang Tsi opened ‘ses Portes aux
Nations Etrangéres’ in the mid-seventeenth century, merchants told Avril around
1690 that they generally had to negotiate at some length with the governors of Su
chou and Kokotan in order to be permitted to continue to the capital. A better method
was to ask a Qalmaq Prince, whose encampment was situated on the route to China,
to send an ambassador there on some pretext or other, so that merchants could enter
Beijing as part of his suite. This was not difficult, “ce qu'il accorde facilement, pour
peu d'honnetetez qu'on lui passe: & c'est 4 la faveur de ce Député, que les Marchands
qui se disent tous de sa suite, entrent librement a la Chine’. Despite the bribe required,
this was probably the cheapest way of reaching Beijing, for the Qalmaq were only
expected to provide the Empire with horses, furs and slaves, and no precious stones
were required from them. There were two other advantages in adopting this method.
The first was that there was little restriction on the numbers of the Qalmaq embassies
allowed into China, as many as 13 entering the country in 1681.!!3 The second was
that there seemed to be no limit to the size of these embassies, for there were 200
Bukharan traders in the suite of the ambassador who accompanied Seitkul Ablin to
Beijing in 1669.114 And within a single week in July 1676 as many as 400 arrived
there with an embassy from the Sungar Galdan and another 70 came over on behalf of

the Khoshout Ochirtu.115
But what of the accommodation offered to merchants in China? According to Du
Halde, although inns were generally dirty and mean, those situated on the main roads
were very large and handsome. However, they were only made of mud, and their
walls -‘quatre murailles de terre battue, sans enduit’ - carried a badly-finished roof
111 Semmedo, 27, 28. If the catte, or catty, still equalled 11/3 Ib avoirdupois (603.16 gr) as in 1598
(Shorter Oxford Dictionary, 278), this meant that the party was expected to present the
Emperor with 603.16 kg of jade and 7.237 kg of lapis lazuli. Yule, IV, 242-3, 243n, is
mistaken in his calculations, partly because he believed that 1,000 arrobas had been presented,
and partly because he thought that the arroba was an Italian measure of weight.

112 Ying Shih, ch. 332, 8626, 8624, 8602. Min Dai, 722, 728, 734, 736. Fairbanks, 153. Amyot,
XIV, 243-7. Bretschneider, Mediaeval researches, Il, 149.

113 Avril, 88. Russko-kitaiskie otnosheniya, 1, 413-4. Fairbanks, 172.
114 Russko-kitaiskie otnosheniya, I, 289.

115 Jhid., I, 412, 414.
453

Bukharan trade

‘dont on compte les chevrons, encore est-on heureux quand on ne voit pas le jour a
travers’. As for the floors, they were often unpaved and full of holes. A particular
advantage of the northern inns was the large brick platform built over a stove on
which merchants could place some sort of mattress and keep warm while sleeping.
Foreigners were not encouraged to remain in China long, and for this reason the
authorities only provided them with food for a maximum of 80 days. This food
included neither fish nor meat, and merchants were expected to sleep on the simple
rush mats provided, although there was no objection to them bringing and using their

own beds.!16
In Beijing Bukharan merchants were accommodated in a special trade hostel
situated 4 versts (4,264 km) from the town. This was a stone building, larger than
that allocated to ambassadors. They slept in dormitories and their expenses were met
by the authorities, but they were expected to leave the capital after seven weeks,

whether they had finished trading or not.!!7
Within China merchants travelled on horseback: or in waggons. Roads were
usually well-paved, but if they were too uneven merchants could elect to travel in
sedan-chairs. Goods were generally carried by porters who required payment in
advance. But large bales were conveyed either by small mules, which managed
between 108 and-114 kg apiece, or by one-wheel carts which were drawn by mules.
Merchants faced a special hazard when travelling in China, for clouds of very fine
dust would often darken the sky, interfere with breathing and nearly blind them,
unless they had taken the precaution of covering their faces and eyes.
Customs dues were paid either in a lump sum, or according to weight. No
indication has been found about the scale of dues, but it is unlikely to have been high,
for the authorities were usually polite and generous to foreigners. Thus, for example,
as Du Halde and Nieuhoff noted with amazement, Customs officials did not examine
a merchant's bales. They were prepared instead to accept his word as to their contents
and value.!!8 The two writers praised the manners of the officials, comparing their
attitude favourably with that of officials in India and Europe: ‘les douanes sont bien
plus douces que celles des Indes, ot les visites se font sans égard, ni a l'humanité, ni
a la pudeur...on ne s'avise pas méme de fouiller un homme’.
No attempt was made to harass merchants in order to ascertain ‘précisément la
quantité, & la qualité de leurs denrées’, and if a traveller, who was not a merchant as
such, took goods from one province to another, he was not required to pay any
internal tolls. Even in the capital trade dues were kept to a minimum. Bell was told
circa 1720 that one could trade freely for a whole year in Beijing, the only tax
required being one ounce of silver payable to the Emperor! !19
The authorities even tried to protect foreigners from local merchants, knowing that
they were wont to deceive purchasers as to the quality of their goods in order to sell
them as dear as possible, on the principle that ‘si celui qui les achéte, est assez simple,
ou assez peu intelligent pour donner (les plus grosses sommes), ce n'est pas le
Marchand qui trompe...c'est celui qui achéte qui se trompe lui-méme’. Foreigners

116 Du Halde, II, 52. According to Semmedo, 27, the authorities did not pay the expenses of
merchants who chose to stop (and trade) on their way to the capital.

117 Russko-kitaiskie otnosheniya, I, 414, 290, 422.
118 Du Halde, II, 54-58. Nieuhoff, 98. Similarly, according to Chardin (Voyage, III, 346) Iranian

Customs officials showed no interest in examining a merchant's load. They only charged a
nominal fee, but this was probably because merchants always gave a large present to their chief.

119 Du Halde, II, 57. Nieuhoff, 98. Bell, Pekin, 180.
454

Trade with Asia

ou assez peu intelligent pour donner (les plus grosses sommes), ce n'est pas le
Marchand qui trompe...c'est celui qui achéte qui se trompe lui-méme’. Foreigners
were strongly advised to conduct their trade only through responsible government
officials and interpreters, for they would make sure that the right prices were charged.
But if they did not choose to do so, they were free to trade as they pleased throughout
their stay in China. And they were always given a very good price for any items
which the Emperor might purchase from them. Thus, according to Semmedo, around
1640 the Emperor gave no less than 2 pieces of gold cloth, plus 30 pieces of yellow
silk, 30 lb of tea, 10 1b of musk, 50 lb of a medicinal plant called tienys (temzui?)

and 50 lb of silver, in exchange for a single horse!!20
Unless a merchant bartered his goods for Chinese goods, he got in exchange a
lump of silver cut to the required weight, there being no such thing as a silver coin,
and copper coins being used only for insignificant purchases. The silver unit in use
was called a lan, laen or liang. According to Seitkul Ablin in 1669 its value was
equal to that of a rouble, although it weighed far less. In his day the lan weighed as
much as 26 altyn 4 den'gi, i.e., 36 or 38 grammes according to whether Ablin was
referring to the real weight of the rouble (46 grammes) or its official weight (48
grammes).!2! The weight of the lan had decreased since 1657 when Baikov equated it
to 9 or 10 Russian zolotniki (38,4 or 42.7 gr), and it would decrease still further

during the remainder of the century. When Lorenz Lange, who represented Russia in
Peking in 1721-2, reported upon his stay, he said it was roughly equal to 1 Dutch
ounce (30 gr).!22
Bukharans took a variety of goods to China, the most important of which was
livestock. The first item on this list was horses, either the horses of Farghana, prized
in China since the days of the T'ang dynasty, or else the horses which they purchased
in Kashghariya and in the Qirghiz, Qalmaq, Mongol settlements on their way. Even
poor quality Mongol horses found a market in China, for horses were essential as a
means of transport, especially for officials, and none were found locally. They were
always included therefore among a caravan's consignment of goods. Thus in 1676
the Muscovite envoy Spatharii was told that 400 Bukharans had brought 2,500 horses
to Beijing, or about six each. He reported that the horses fetched 20 to 30 lans if their

quality was poor and 70 to 80 if it was ‘good’ .123
Camels were second on this list. Rossabi mentions the two-humped Bactrian
camel whose ‘heavy winter coat’ made him ‘well suited to the caravan trade of Inner
Asia’, and Bretschneider writes about one-humped camels from Samargand. It is not
known which type Spatharii was able to purchase from the Bukharan compound for
his return journey from China, but the fact that he was readily granted permission to
buy camels suggests that they were available in large numbers in Beijing in 1676. Van
Klenk was told that Bukharans took cattle to China which they bartered there against

120 Dy Halde, II, 170. Russko-kitaiskie otnosheniya, I, 291, 413. Yule, 1, CCXXI. Semmedo, 28.
121 Bell, Pekin, 151-2. Du Halde, II, 164, 167-8. Russko-kitaiskie otnosheniya, I, 293. Sakharov,
110, 114. The rouble weighed 66.83 gr in 1610, but from

1618, according to Mel'nikova

(167,174, 209) its weight began to decrease.
122 Yaterialy po istorii russko-mongol'skie otnosheniya, 1, 403. Lange, 9, 228. See Moreland,
From Akbar, 333, for the Dutch pound of 494 grammes.
123 See Mindai, 734, 736, for a mention of horses imported into China from Samargand in 1576

and 1581. Bretschneider, Mediaeval

researches, 270. Rossabi, 72, says the horses were

exchanged for tea on the frontier. Russko-kitaiskie otnosheniya, 1, 413-4.

455

Bukharan trade

Samarqand.
124

Bukharans also supplied the Chinese with furs of all types which they had
purchased in Siberia. In 1672 a group of Bukharan merchants informed the Siberian
authorities that there was a market in China for furs of every quality. Cheap sable
oddments could be sold in Beijing, they said, as well as the less valuable ‘belly’ of
the hare, and the untreated pelts of ermines and squirrels. There was a market for

otters and lynxes, as well as beavers, whether live or as pelts. Buyers could be found
for the cheaper variety of fox which sold at 4 to 5 roubles for 10, as well as the
expensive dark-brown fox which fetched 3 to 5 roubles apiece. The margin of profit
was large, for 100 ermine pelts, which sold at about 15 roubles in Moscow in 1666
and at 6 roubles in Tobol'sk in 1686, sold for 25 lans/roubles in Beijing in 1676. Yet

Spatharii's informant, a ‘Bukharan’ from Turfan,!25 called this a low price, and with
reason, for until the early 1670s, when Bukharan merchants began to flood the

Chinese market with fur, a single ermine pelt had fetched as much as 2 roubles.!26
A wide range of items used in jewellery and in the decorative arts was brought in
for the benefit of Chinese craftsmen. They included red and white coral beads, amber,
bone and walrus tusks from Siberia, as well as precious stones from the khanate,

Kashghariya and India. Walrus tusks were highly valued in China. However, a major
rise in Bukharan imports, which began in 1670, caused prices to fall sharply, as
happened in the case of ermine. As a result, when Spatharii threatened Chinese
officials in 1676 with the prohibition of Russian exports, in retaliation for their policy
of keeping him locked in his compound as in a prison, they just laughed at him. The
prohibition would not affect them, they said, for there were large enough stocks in
Beijing. And the walrus finger shields which they used when shooting arrows would
never go back to their earlier and prohibitive price of 50 roubles.
127
The precious stones taken to China included the Kashghariyan jade (yu shi),
together with agates, diamonds, and lapis lazuli. According to Semmedo, the jade
was made up into ornaments worn on the head, and into the special girdles which the
Emperor gave his officials. As for the lapis lazuli of Badakhshan, according to
Abaeva it was used for colouring certain types of porcelain and for decorating
manuscripts, as well as objects made of papier maché, but no indication has been
found of the quantities carried.!28
Bukharans also took metal goods to China. The Chinese authorities apparently
rewarded them well for the knives and swords which they brought over, and in this
context it should be noted that between 100 to 500 small knives figured among the
goods presented by more than one so-called envoy. At the same time Bukharans were
encouraged to bring over Muscovite muskets, for which the Chinese offered to pay as
much as 100 roubles apiece. Spatharii was told that the Chinese soon learnt to use
them, Emperor K'ang Tsi himself having become so proficient that he could kill a
124 Rossabi, 73. Bretschneider, Mediaeval researche, 270. Russko-kitaiskie otnosheniya, I, 430.
Van Klenk, 441.

125 Tt is not clear whether he originally hailed from the khanate or whether he was in fact a
Kashghariyan from Turfan, Kashghariya being also known as ‘Little Bukhariya’.

126 Russko-kitaiskie otnosheniya, I, 414, 407.
127 Titov, 78. Russko-kitaiskie otnosheniya, I, 300, 248, 407. Kurts, "Sochinenie", 116. The cost
of coral beads in Moscow in 1666 was 18 roubles per lb , higher than that of walrus tusks,
which cost 17 roubles per pud in 1674, or musk which was then worth 12 to 15 roubles per lb.

128 Semmedo, 27-28. Amyot, 244, 247, records that two so-called envoys from Samarqand each
presented K'ang Tsi with 50 lb of yu shi. Rossabi, 74. Abaeva, Ocherki, 68.

456

Trade with Asia

bird on the wing. Other items transported by Bukharans were files and axes. 129

Finally, a variety of miscellaneous goods was carried, which ranged from hides to
sal ammoniac. Red, silver and gold hides came from Siberia, as did mirrors and red
woollen cloth. Thus in 1669 Seitkul Ablin took over 500 roubles' worth of hides,
together with 30 mirrors and 28 lengths of ‘kersey’ and the Polish type of woollen
cloth called lyatchina.13° The mirrors cannot have sold well on that occasion,
however, for they were not included in the list of suitable Muscovite exports to China
which he and other mefchants compiled for the Tsar only three years later. As for the
cloth, the same merchants suggested that no more than ten lengths each of red, black
and dark green kersey of good quality, plus ten lengths of Polish cloth be sent by the
Tsar. The Chinese, they explained, wore the cloth in the rain and were not prepared to
spend very much on it. This did not prevent ordinary Bukharan merchants from
importing cloth into China in the 1680s, and Gerbillon noted in 1697 that the best
serges (‘les plus propres’) were taken there by ‘les marchands Mores qui viennent du
cété des Yusbeks, pour traffiquer 4 la Chine’ .!3!
Dried fruit from the khanate and slaves from various countries also figured among
Bukharan imports, as did carpets and the thin, stiff cotton material which Semmedo
called bdfetas. Gerbillon, for example, wrote in 1697 that Emperor K'ang Tsi had
presented him and his fellow Catholic missionaries with two sorts of raisins and
currants originating either in ‘Si ning’ or in ‘Tu fan’ and in the country of the

‘Uzbeks’.!132 Slaves were a valuable commodity, fetching between 70 and 100
lans/roubles apiece in Beijing in 1676. Sal ammoniac (ammonium chloride), which
according to Potanin was also called ‘Bukharan salt’ and may have come from
Kashghariya, was another item on their list of imports. In Siberia it was combined
with tobacco as a cure for malignant anthrax, but according to Rossabi it was used in
China as a basic ingredient for incendiary weapons, and also as a cure, either for skin
diseases, or for bronchial congestion.!3
Let us now turn to the goods which Bukharans purchased in China. There was a
great variety of items, ranging from materials to gems.
The most popular cotton material was kitaika. A sturdy and cheap variety of
kitaika first appeared in the Siberian records for 1648-9 and went on to take an

increasing share of the Tobol'sk market in the following 20 years.!34 Other materials
included rednina, daba, black zenden' and Chinese byaz',!35 in addition to which
Bukharans were prepared to carry Chinese raw cotton to Siberia where it sold at only
1.7 roubles per pud, as against the Bukharan variety which fetched between 3.5 and
10 roubles per pud. Thus in 1669 Seitkul Ablin took to Siberia 4,416 dress lengths of

129 Rossabi, 74. Semmedo, 27. Amyot, 244, 247. Baddeley, II, 345n.
130 Russko-kitaiskie otnosheniya, 1, 247-8. Wilcox, 184, says kersey was ‘a firm, pliable all-wool
cloth, coarse and ribbed. Men's long stockings were made of it’.

131 Russko-kitaiskie otnosheniya, 1, 300. Titov, 78. Du Halde, IV, 372. Wilcox, 307, describes
serge as a ‘worsted yarn with diagonal twill formerly popular for coats’.

132 Semmedo, 27. Du Halde, IV, 372.
133 Russko-kitaiskie

otnosheniya, 1, 413-4. Potanin, "O karavannoi torgovle", 55-56. Semmedo,

27. Rossabi, 75.

134 yaterialy, 344-5, 350-1, 376. Vilkov, Remeslo, tables 21 and 29. Tomsk, 148-9. Ziyaev,
Ekonomicheskie svyazi, 50, 60, 61, 70. Russko-kitaiskie otnosheniya,l, 297. In 1669 Ablin
took back as many as 4,193 dress lengths of kitaika.

135 Materialy, 344-5, 452. Vilkov, "Kitaiskie tovary", 109. Vilkov, Remeslo, tables 21 and 29.
Ziyaev, Ekonomicheskie svyazi, 60. TsGADA, fond 214, op.1, kn. 588, list 37a.

457

Bukharan trade

byaz' and as much as 458.64 kg (23 pud and 1 cher’) of raw cotton from China. 136
Cotton cummerbunds and caftans made of kitaika were also purchased, if only for the
Siberian market, while other items, such as turbans and outer garments, were taken to

the khanate.!37
Silks of all types, including silk thread, satins, velvets and damask also figured
on the Bukharans' shopping list. This was so before 1558 and was still the case in the
1660s, as reported by Jenkinson and by a group of Danish officers living in exile in
Siberia. Bukharan traders in fact bought anything from raw silk to parasols made of
zarbaft. Chinese damask decorated with roses or tulips and other patterns carefully
embroidered in gold and silver thread are known to have ended up in Siberia, as did
silks and damask expertly dyed in a whole range of colours. Satin woven with gold
seems to have been particularly popular with the Bukharans settled in Siberia, as was
cloth of gold made of satin brocade with gold flowers. Such items may have also
reached the khanate, for the so-called envoys ‘from Samarqand’ tended to ask for a
few pieces of these luxury materials, or for an assortment of coloured silks, in
exchange for the jade and other offerings which they brought as tribute. And there
were Chinese goods and parasols among the gifts which Nadir Muhammad

distributed to officials and others in 1639.138
Tea also figured among their requests, as well as kuen, which was apparently
similar to tea but had a more iron-like flavour. Oddly enough, although the envoys
from Samarqand placed a high value on tea, asking modestly to be given ‘quelques
feuilles de thé’ to take back, Tsar Aleksei does not appear to have been impressed by
the samples which Baikov brought him in 1658. Seitkul Ablin must have known
about this, for when the Emperor gave him 10 pud-(163.80kg) of ‘the herb tea’ for
his master in 1662 he did not hesitate to sell it off and to use the money in order to
buy precious stones, which he deemed more likely to please the Tsar.!39 Other
Bukharan merchants did take tea to Siberia, but the quantities which they delivered
were far smaller than those of rhubarb. This was probably because the margin of

profit was lower, rhubarb not only fetching a higher price in Siberia,!4° but costing
considerably less than tea in China. A certain Hajji Muhammad, who went to China
with a caravan from Central Asia, explained in 1550 that the people of Su chou would
give a whole sack of rhubarb for 1 0z. of Chiai Catai. They particularly valued the
chiai (tea) for its curative virtues, claiming that it brought down a fever, dispelled
headaches, stomach aches and pains in the joints, and even helped with the digestion.
Rhubarb, on the other hand, was not used medicinally. According to Hajji
Muhammad, they (just) pounded it together with odoriferous ingredients to make an
incense which they burnt ‘as perfume in front of idols’. Worse still, in some parts of
China rhubarb was so abundant that it might be given to sick horses or even used as

136 Russko-kitaiskie otnosheniya, I, 294. Materialy, 379. Anon., Beschreibung, 22.

137 Vilkov, Remeslo, tables 21 and 29. Materialy, 344-5. Mahmid b. Wali (Ethé), 254b-5a.
138 Semmedo, 28. Jenkinson, "The Voyage", 473. Anon., Beschreibung, 22. Russko-kitaiskie
otnosheniya, I, 250, 294, 296-7. Watered silk from China was also taken back. Amyot, 243,

244, 247. Mahmiid b. Wali (Ethé), 255a.
139 Amyot, 244. Russko-kitaiskie otnosheniya, I, 250.

140 Materialy, 379. Tea was valued there between 3.4 and 8 roubles per pud as against rhubarb,
which

fetched

10 to 18 roubles.

See Ziyaev,

Ekonomicheskie

svyazi (60, 50) and

Chimitdorzhiev, "K istorii", for Bukharans taking tea to Siberia. See Materialy, 346-7, 348-9,
354-5, 356-7, for yearly imports to Tobol'sk and Tara.

458

Trade with Asia

fuel, for it was ‘very little esteemed’. !4!
In addition to tea and rhubarb Bukharans bought a whole range of herbs,
medicinal plants and spices in China. These included cinnamon, temzui, bad'yan,
musk, and various types of tobacco. There were also the mysterious ‘remédes de
nature chaude’ requested by an ‘envoy’ from Samarqand, the ‘strange pepper’
mentioned by Danish exiles in Siberia, and the ‘yellow powder’ of which Ablin

purchased two-thirds of a lb in 1669.142
Paper was also purchased by Bukharans in China, although from the request to
the Emperor by a certain Ha sei tse of Samarqand, it seems that they were probably
only interested in the luxury type of gold paper which was not made in the khanate.
Chinese carpets were carried to Tobol'sk, where local Bukharans used them to
decorate their homes. Chinese paintings were apparently taken to India, for Sarkar
says that ‘The Mughals introduced Chinese painting by way of Bokhara and
Khurasan at Akbar's Court.’ And articles made of Chinese porcelain and faience were
taken back for the khans who might later send some specimens off as gifts to the Tsar

or to the Mughals, as Nadir Muhammad is known to have done in 1639.143
Last, but not least, Bukharans purchased precious stones, silver and gold in
China to take back with them, but they ignored such items as beavers or snowleopards, which the Emperor himself presented to fellow-monarchs as a mark of
esteem. Thus Ablin himself bought 352 precious stones during his first official visit
to Beijing, and he acquired no less than 2,532 during his second visit. He gives little
detail about them, except that these were Jal (rubies) and yakhont, a general term used
for rubies, sapphires, amethyst and topazes, but in 1640-1, according to Semmedo,
rubies were the only type of precious stone taken back by the merchants of
Samargand and other Muslim countries.
!44 In the 1660s a variety of precious stones
originating in China reached Siberia where they were apparently sold secretly. Pearls
were cheaper in China than in Moscow, but, as they only available in units of over 16
kg, they were a less practical proposition, and this was pointed out by Seitkul Ablin
and another Tobol'sk Bukharan in 1672 when they were consulted by the Siberian
authorities regarding possible imports from China. The silver was taken out of China
in the form of silver bars, or else as silver jewellery and dishes, such as the lidded
mug decorated with copper and gold and weighing 6 lb which Ablin purchased there
in 1669 for 45 roubles. As for the gold, it cost 140 or 200 den'gi per zolotnik (4.3

gr), i.e. 67 to 96 roubles per Russian lb around 1670.14

141 Yule, I, CCXV-CCXVI. Rhubarb is also mentioned by Semmedo
Voyage" (473) and Titov (78, 136).

(28), Jenkinson,

"The

142 yaterialy, 346-7, 349, 355. Titov, 78, 136-8. Russko-kitaiskie otnosheniya, I, 250, 294.
Chimitdorzhiev, "K istorii". Amyot, XIV, 244. Anon., Beschreibung, 22.

143 Amyot, XIV, 243, 247. Anon., Beschreibung, 20. Sarkar, Mughal administration, 245.
Materialy, 98. TsGADA,

fond 109, op.1, 1669-75 kn.1, list 82b. Mahmid

b. Wali (Ethé),

272a. Rossabi, 76, says Chinese porcelain was already popular in Central Asia in the fourteenth

century. Semmedo, 28.
144 Russko-kitaiskie otnosheniya, 1, 250, 251, 294. Materialy, 461. Semmedo, 28. However, in
1688 as many as 300 coral beads figured on the list of goods carried by two merchants travelling

to Turinsk from Irkutsk (and presumably China). Chimitdorzhiev, "K istorii".
145 Anon., Beschreibung, 22. Russko-kitaiskie otnosheniya, 300, 296. Titov, 78, 138.

459

14
Trade with Muscovy

Much more data is available on the activities of Bukharans trading in Muscovy and
Siberia than about their activities in Asia. This is because the Tsars issued detailed
regulations concerning trade and taxation, and wrote-carefully considered directives
about the exemptions which might be granted to privileged individuals. A number of
Siberian and other Customs books have also survived, as well as inventories, reports
from officials, lists of traders and goods. However, it is not easy to find an exact
definition of the-terms used, and as for weights, measures and taxes, they were all
likely to vary from time to time, or from locality to locality.
Thus, although Siberia was under the control of Moscow, rather different rules

applied there with regard to trade, for it was a new part of the Empire, on the frontier,
with no proper agriculture or trade. Bukharan merchants were therefore granted
special privileges as they were the main suppliers of staple goods. Immigrants from
the khanate were also welcomed as settlers, for they were willing and able to till the
land.
This was not the case in Muscovy, where there was a settled population who tilled
the land. Here the Bukharan contribution, although useful, was not essential, as
eastern goods could be obtained from a multitude of other countries, either directly, or
else indirectly via the Dutch and the English. Eastern suppliers of similar goods
included the keenly competitive merchants and rulers of neighbouring Khwarazm,
whose aggressive tactics often disrupted the Bukharo-Muscovite trade, as well as the
traders of Iran and India who were courted by the Tsars because large and tempting
quantities of luxury goods were produced in their countries.
The ancient trading connection between Bukhara and the towns of the Volga
continued even after Kazan’, in 1552, and Astrakhan, in 1556, fell to the rulers of
Muscovy. Special inns (gostinyi dvor) for foreign and out-of-town merchants were
provided by the Muscovite authorities, in which merchants were expected to stay and
to conduct their trading operations. In Astrakhan, for example, there was a
‘Bukharan’ gostinyi dvor where in 1615 a number of merchants claimed to have been
living for the previous ‘10 or 15 years or more’. This inn, however, was not
exclusively reserved for Bukharans. It also accomodated Armenians, Khwarazmians,
Tatars and Indians.! In Moscow Bukharan traders seem to have stayed in the Iranian
gostinyi dvor, although in 1661 they were staying in the ambassadors' lodgings and
in ‘the old English money inn’, a term which applied to the former offices of the
1 Pamyatniki, XXII, 61, 123. Materialy, 161. P.S.Z., 1, 670. Russko-indiiskie
Golikova, 161-62.

otnosheniya, 91.

Trade with Muscovy

Muscovy Company.?
Kostomarov describes the gostinyi dvor as a building with sturdy gates which
were locked at night. The living-quarters and shops were situated in a long and
narrow two-storied gallery around a large inner courtyard which housed a Customs
post, large government scales, storerooms and a number of haylofts. There were
three types of accommodation available for a merchant and his goods: an ambar (pl.
ambary) or warehouse which he shared with several others, a zatvornaya lavka
which was meant for three, and a single room. In the case of a.single room and a
zatvornaya lavka, a key was handed over to the occupant who was then held
responsible for its cleanliness and for the safety of his belongings. The caretaker of
the building or dvornik, on the other hand, was responsible for the cleanliness of the
communal ambar and for the safety of the goods deposited there in the special
containers provided by the authorities, which were either hooked to the wall, or
attached to a post.
The gostinyi dvor enabled the authorities to keep the activities of traders under
Strict supervision and in particular to make sure that Customs and trade dues were
paid before any transactions were completed. Merchants were of course charged
accommodation and storage fees. There was a flat rate for the accommodation fee or
gostinoe, but the storage fee, appropriately named ambarnaya/ambarnoe if using a
communal ambar, or polavochnaya if using a shop, depended on the length of a
merchant's stay and was paid weekly. In 1588 a regulation applicable to Kholmogory
near Arkhangel'sk laid down that out-of-town merchants using the storehouses
(ambary) should pay 1 den’ga per week in ambarnoe, i.e. twice the rate payable by
local traders, and during the seventeenth century the rate of storage increased. Thus in
the 1630s out-of-town merchants wishing to trade in Ustyug Velikii on the Dvina had
to pay between 5 and 7 den'gi per week in ambarnoe, and they were also charged 12
den'gi per person and 12 den'gi per horse in accomodation fee (gostinoe), regardless
of the length of their stay. Assuming that foreigners paid no more, and that the rates
charged were identical throughout the country, then Bukharans would have had to
find between 29 and 31 den'gi for a single week's stay.4
This could have made a lengthy stay in Muscovy prohibitive for them, but in fact
eastern traders in general, and Bukharans in particular, were specially favoured by the
authorities. Eastern traders were given such large quarters in the traders' inns of
Astrakhan that they were able to sub-let part of them to new arrivals. And Bukharans
received a generous allowance which, if we are to credit Nadir Muhammad's envoy
Khwajah Ibrahim, was 50 den'gi per day in Moscow in 1620. If such was indeed the
scale of their allowance, it would have amply covered their accommodation expenses
and other needs. Food and drink are unlikely to have been provided, although

Khwajah Jan, the commercial agent of the Juibari shaikhs who went to Moscow

2 §.G.G.D., IV, 73.
3 Shumakov, 260, explains that the polavochnoe varied according to the size of the shop hired and
to the quality of the goods sold. Although he agrees that the ambarnoe was paid per week, he adds
that it could be assessed differently according to the number of warehouses rented, and according to
the value or quantity of goods stored. Osokin, 59-60, says merchants trading in silk or cloth paid
the polavochnaya in a lump sum of 24 den'gi to cover their whole stay. N.B. The names of the
various taxes were used indiscriminately, either in the feminine form ending in ‘aya’ or in the
masculine form ending in ‘oe’.

4 Akty sobrannye v bibliotekakh, 1, 410. Yakovlev, I, 35, 74, 75 and pass.

461

Bukharan trade

around 1550, did receive generous supplies from the authorities. This only happened,
however, after the ‘governor’ (wdli) of the town found out that he had been sent by

Khwajah Islam.>
The generous allowance and accomodation given to eastern traders, together with
the provision of a mosque in Astrakhan, were aimed at encouraging them to come to
Muscovy, but their freedom of action could be drastically curtailed by some of the
voevody. These civilian-cum-military governors were particularly powerful in frontier
towns, where they were in a position to control trade and foreign relations, in addition
to performing their usual administrative and military duties. They were generally
appointed for two years during which many strove to enrich themselves. In 1615 a
number of serious complaints were lodged against the voevoda of Astrakhan, which
were carefully investigated on behalf of Tsar Mikhail. The voevoda was said to have
sealed off the mosque until he was given two pieces of “doroga’ by each Muslim
merchant. He was accused of charging excessive trade dues and purposely
undervalueing the traders' goods. It was even-claimed that he had refused recent
arrivals the right to trade and had kept them locked up in the inn until they gave him
suitable ‘presents’ in money and in kind. Finally, he had sealed off the shops in the
gostinyi dvor in which six Bukharans had been-trading for more than ten years, and
compelled them to pay bribes before they could resume their activities. This was not
an isolated incident, for in the same year the voevoda of Tsaritsyn was accused of
taking advantage of his position in order to seize large quantities of goods from the

agent of a Central Asian merchant.®
Other problems confronted Bukharan merchants in Muscovy. Firstly, if like
Khwajah Jan, they did not know Russian, they had to conduct their trade through an
interpreter, which meant extra expense.’ Secondly, local merchants resented foreign
competitors. In order to keep commerce in their own hands, they tried to restrict
Bukharans and other foreign visitors to trading on the frontiers, and they petitioned
the Tsars repeatedly to try and protect their own position by curtailing the rights of
foreigners. Thirdly, for religious and security reasons, the Tsars and the religious
leaders were keen to protect ‘holy’ Moscow from foreigners, which meant that access
to the capital and to its profitable market was often restricted, and only granted as a
special privilege.
Fourthly, the Muscovite merchant was a formidable competitor. By all accounts
he was deceitful as well as crafty, and liked nothing better than tricking his opposite
number by making the tiny den'ga disappear into his mouth and then pretending that
he had not received it. He was a past master in the art of barter and was always ready
to swear to the excellent quality of his goods. He would even use his fists to prove
his point. A particularly confusing practice was that of purchasing large quantities of
foreign goods only to sell them back later to the same merchants at a lower price. This
practice, which

western

merchants

greatly resented, must

have also affected

Bukharans. It arose from the Muscovite habit of buying local supplies on credit, and
selling them by barter at a highly inflated value. In exchange they would demand and
5 Materialy, 253, 150. Badr al-Din, 90a.

6 Pamyatniki,
of Tsaritsyn
7 Badr al-Din,
and he took

XXII, 59-61, 86-7, 94, 116-8, 122-4. Another strange complaint against the voevoda
was that he had forced the same man to marry a non-Muslim woman.
90a. Klyuchevskii, Skazaniya, 300, says a broker was always present during a sale,
‘presents’ from both sides. Russko-kitaiskie otnosheniya, I, 403, 413.

462

Trade with Muscovy
obtain such excessive quantities of foreign goods that their value would slump on the

internal market. They then took these foreign goods to market where they offered
them for sale at ridiculously low prices. This invariably tempted their European
counterparts to buy them back, but they had to pay cash, and since cash was rare and
valuable in Muscovy, and the local goods had been over-priced in the first place, the
Muscovites would end up with a very handsome profit.8
Finally, the Bukharans had to face powerful, and often unfair competition from
the Tsar himself. All foreign goods coming into Muscovy had to be examined by one
of his agents or gost' (pl. gosti ) before their sale was permitted on the open market.
The gosti took away the best items for his use, and although the Tsar eventually paid
for them, he never gave the full market price. He would also periodically and quite
arbitrarily remove some items from the open market. His reason for taking a whole
range of goods out of circulation was either that they were in short supply, or that
there was such a great demand for them that he was assured of a high revenue if he
monopolized their sale and took the profit, as well as the tax, for his Treasury. These
items then became either ukaznye goods which could only be sold by the Tsar's
agents at his price, or else zapovednye tovary (‘reserved’ or ‘forbidden’ monopoly
goods) which were not available to ordinary merchants. If the articles in question
originated in Muscovy, foreign merchants were told that they could no longer
purchase them and that those which they had purchased before the prohibition took
effect should be sold to the Tsar's agents for an arbitrarily low price.? If, on the other
hand, the newly-proscribed articles came from abroad, they had to be taken or sent
back.
Bukharans brought to Muscovy a very large assortment of the cotton and silk
goods which were part of their stock-in-trade. In addition to zenden', byaz', vyboika
and others, they carried materials from Iran, Alexandria and others described as
‘Arabic’. To Moscow they took the expensive silks which had no market in Siberia.
To Kazan' and Ufa they delivered ready-made clothes and cummerbunds, together
with a miscellany of items including Bukharan bows, rhubarb, indigo, horses, goat
leather from the khanate, and even furs from Siberia. In exchange they purchased
hides, woollen cloth, wooden dishes, mirrors, walrus tusks, castoreum, slaves, furs,
madder and haberdashery, all of which they either took back to the khanate, or else
sold off en route. They were also keen to buy items such as wax, gunpowder, gold
and metal goods, if available on the market. Even when the export of gunpowder and

military hardware was forbidden, which often happened, Bukharan merchants still
managed to deal in them, for they were allowed to take them to Siberia and sell them
there, as they did with Muscovite furs, cloth and hides.!°
Trading conditions faced by Bukharans in Muscovy changed repeatedly during
the period under review. They were often identical to those faced by other Central
Asian merchants, all of whom were called teziki in Muscovy, an adjective such as
Bukharan, Kizylbash, Yurgenchi or Gilyan being appended in order to distinguish
between them. However, some of the rulings imposed by the tsars were aimed
8 Kostomaroyv,

159, 181. Dovnar-Zapol'skii,

III, 329-30.

Kurts, "Sochinenie",

89-90, 253-5.

Klyuchevskii, Skazaniya, 300.
9 Kulisher, 157-160. S.G.G.D., II, 57-58. Mulyukin, 59, 63. Materialy, 107.
10 Pamyatniki, XXII, 276-7, 640-4. A.1., HII, 63; IV, 141. Materialy, 366-7, 197. See Ziyaev,
Ekonomicheskie svyazi, 56-57, for Muscovite goods taken to Siberia.

463

Bukharan trade

specifically at Bukharans. For the earlier period there are four main original sources
which help to establish the scale of taxation applicable. One is a letter from Fedor I in
the spring of 1588 to the Customs officials of the Dvina in which he reminded them
of the dues to be exacted from merchants arriving in Kholmogory. Another is the
regulation issued by Vasilii Shuisky in 1606 in connection with the Customs dues to
be taken in Suzdal. A third valuable source, listing the taxes farmed and their exact

scales, is a number of documents dated 1586 and 1587. The fourth source illustrates
more specifically the treatment meted out to Central Asians in Muscovy and consists
of the depositions of a certain Khwarazmian merchant called Hajji Avez (Awaz) who
spent three years there from 1585-6. Hajji Avez and his companions had several
problems during their stay. They wrote twice to Tsar Fedor to complain about the
Kazan' voevoda, and their letters give us a valuable insight into the difficulties which

they encountered due to the complexities of the Muscovite taxation system.!!
There was a multitude of taxes to pay, larger payments, not surprisingly, being
required from foreigners, although in many cases they paid no more than ‘out-oftown’ Muscovites. These taxes fell into four main categories. The first were
demanded when merchants arrived in a town, even before they were permitted to
unload their goods. The second related to the provision of accommodation and
storage space for these goods. The third revolved around sales and purchases. And
the fourth concerned merchants who removed unsold items from one town and took
them to another, either in transit, or in order to sell them. Defaulters paid large fines,

the rate for which was generally 2 roubles (400 den'gi) for goods worth 2 roubles
and over.
When a merchant arrived in a town, he was first required to present himself to the
Customs officials with his goods. His particulars were taken and his goods were
entered, after which he paid a declaration fee (yavka or yavlenoe). In the town of
Oreshka, for example, which was situated in the Novgorod area, the rate was

den'ga for local merchants in 1523 and 6 den'gi for foreigners, but it had gone up to
4 den'gi and 12 den'gi by 1586.!2 There was also a head tax or golovshchina to pay
on entering or going past a town, which in 1571 was 0.5 den'ga for a local merchant
and 2 den'gi for a foreigner.!3 Other taxes related to the weight of the goods carried
and the means of transport used. The gruzovaya applied to heavy loads and was
charged at the rate of 44 den'gi per 100 pud (1,638 kg) and 440 on 1,000 pud
(16,380 kg) transported on a boat in 1588. The sval'naya also related to weight. It
was only payable by out-of-town merchants and foreigners and was presumably an
additional tax. Its rate was far lower, however, for it ranged from 1 den'ga for a
barrel of fish and 2 den'gi for 20 pud (32.76 kg) of honey, to 100 den'gi for a load of
11 Akty sobrannye v bibliotekakh, I, 409-11; Il, 144-7. S.G.G.D., Il, 89-93. Materialy, 106-7.

12 Kulisher, 180. Osokin, 50-54, quotes the same examples but gives dates of 1562 and 1586. He
also says that local traders were only required to pay yavka between 1571 and 1586. Shumakov,
258, writes that yavka was paid twice, first on bringing goods into a town, and then when selling
them. Local merchants were exempt from yavka, but they still had to present their goods for

Customs inspection.
13 Qsokin, 30-32. S.G.G.D., Il, 54-55. Shumakov, 260, says there was (also) a pogolovshchina of
6 den'gi payable per slave, the rate of which seems excessive if it was merely a declaration tax
like the golovshchina. However, from a document issued in Novgorod in 1571 it would appear
that this was in fact the amount required as tamga from the purchaser of a slave in 1571, which is
more in line with the 4 den'gi per rouble charged to out-of-town merchants and the 7 den'gi per
rouble charged to foreigners as tamga on most types of goods.

464

Trade with Muscovy

1,000 pud.!4 The posazhennaya was a transport tax paid by out-of-town visitors on
boats according to their length. In Kholmogory in 1588 this was charged at the rate of
60 den'gi for an ordinary boat, 100 den'gi for a doshchanik and 120 den'gi for a
nasad. However, exemptions might be granted, as they were in that year to the
Stroganov brothers, to a certain Danilo of Vologda and to English and German
merchants, all of whom were also exempted from the polozovaya, the similar tax
charged at 4 den'gi per person and affecting visitors arriving on sledges and carts, as

well as individual ridefs.15
These initial payments were followed by others which were required at the
government inns. In addition to the gostinoe and ambarnoe already mentioned,
visitors had to pay a triple tax which combined the ambarnaya with two other taxes,
the dvorovaya and the povorotnaya, and which was assessed according to the value
of the merchant's goods. In 1588 it amounted to 4 den'gi per rouble for out-of-town
merchants and applied to fur, raw cotton, materials such as velvet, damask, satin and
woollen cloth, caftans, money, and ‘any dry goods’ such as incense which they
might bring to Kholmogory. Not surprisingly salt and grain were excluded from this
list, as they were staple foods the import of which had to be encouraged. Local
merchants bringing in the same assortment of goods were charged at the reduced rate
of 1.5 den'gi per rouble if they did not wish to stay in the gostinyi dvor. However,
the rate of ambarnoe required from them was doubled to 1 den'ga per week,
presumably because the articles in question were valuable and all goods over the value
of 1 rouble were expected to be stored and sold in the gostinyi dvor.1¢
Out-of-town merchants who tried to stay outside the gostinyi dvor saved nothing.
Tsar Vasilii Shuisky stipulated in 1606 that if they stayed with a local resident, they
should pay the ambarnoe on the value of their goods, plus a fee of 4 den'gi
(khozhenoe) to the official (pristav) who served them notice, and their hosts should

be penalized to the tune of 50 den'gi. If they “did not stay anywhere’ and dealt in
goods worth more than one rouble, then they should compelled to stay in the gostinyi
dvor where they would presumably pay the triple tax, and they would also be liable to
both the khozhenoe of 4 den'gi and the sval'noe of 2 den'gi per cartload.!7
There was also a tax called dvorovaya which was only paid by out-of-town
merchants, and which consisted of two payments. The first was made by the
purchaser at the time of purchase and depended on the type and quality of the goods.
Thus the rate on 1,000 squirrels was 4 den'gi in both 1586 and 1606, but the rate on
40 sables, which was 6 den'gi in 1586, had gone down to 4 den'gi by 1606. The
second payment, a small additional fee of 0.5 den'ga per rouble, was charged on the
value of furs and ‘weighable’ goods when they were taken out of the gostinyi dvor.!8

14 Akty sobrannye v bibliotekakh, I, 411, 409; Il, 147.
15 Akty sobrannye v bibliotekakh, I, 411, 408.

16 Akty sobrannye v bibliotekakh, 1, 409-10.
17 Tpid., 11, 147. Osokin, 58. Knigi, pass. The ambarshchina appears to have replaced the ambarnoe
in the latter part of the seventeenth century as a weekly payment for using the warehousing
facilities of the gostinyi dvor. In 1674 it was 4 altyn 1 den'gi per week, i.e. 25 den’gi.
Shumakov, 260, equates the povorotnaya with the dvorovaya.
18 §G.G.D.,

Il, 89-90. Akty sobrannye

v bibliotekakh,

I, 146-7. Osokin, 61-64, calls the

dvorovaya the povorotnaya-podzornaya-dvorovaya, gives erroneous rates, and says only that it
was paid when the purchaser took the goods out of the gostinyi dvor. Shumakov, 260, only
mentions that the ‘dvorovoe’, which he equates with the povorotnoe, was taken when the

465

Bukharan trade

‘Weighable goods’ such as honey, wax, salt, caviar, lard, mercury, vermilion,
copper, lead and tin, bore special dues, as did corn, wheat, rye, hops and
gunpowder.!9 First rukoznobnaya had to be paid when the goods were officially
weighed, which, in 1588, meant 1 den'ga from the purchaser and another from the
seller for each weighing operation (pod‘em) plus 1 den'ga, presumably charged to the
purchaser, for having the weight entered in a register and on a bill of lading. The rate
had gone up to 2 den'gi for foreigners in 1606, and was also 2 den’gi in the case of
local merchants and other Muscovites dealing with furs or salt. Then when the
‘weighables’ were sold four taxes had to be paid, namely, pod'emnaya,
pudovshchitsa, pomernoe and mytnaya. Pod'emnaya and pudovshchitsa payments
were shared by both sides. Pod'emnaya applied only to items weighing over a pud
and sold by the barrel or cartload. Its rate was 2 den'gi (i.e. 1 den'ga per merchant) in
the late sixteenth century, and twice as much by 1633-4. Pudovshchitsa was more
onerous, for it was assessed on the value of the goods. Its rate in Novgorod in 1571
appears to have been 2 den'gi per rouble (1 den'ga per-merchant) for Muscovites and
4 den'gi per rouble (2 den'gi each) in the case of foreigners. But in fact it seems that

there were many different rates applicable to different types of goods.?°
The Novgorod tax farmers received very complicated and even contradictory
instructions about the pudovshchitsa in 1587. The general ruling was that all
merchants were to pay the same amount, viz. 2 den'gi per rouble (i.e. twice as much
as in 1571), but a difference was made between the purchaser, who had to pay in
cash, and the seller who could pay in kind. Out-of-town merchants dealing in
incense, tin, lead, mercury and dyes of any type were charged 2 den'gi per rouble if
buying, and only half a den'ga if selling. And as for foreigners, they were assessed
by weight, not value. On incense, tin, lead, mercury and dyes they paid a lump sum
of 80 Moscow den'gi plus 3 den'gi each per berkovets (10 pud, i.e., 163.8kg). On
wax the rate was 200 Moscow den'gi per berkovets, and the rate for pepper was 10
Moscow den'gi per 1/21b.2! Perhaps because the complicated system of 1587 proved
unprofitable, Vasilii Shuisky issued new regulations in 1606 which radically altered
the collection of pudovshchitsa and which applied an identical rate to purchasers and
sellers. This was established as 2 den'gi per rouble on salt and furs, 1 den'ga per
rouble on wax, honey, lead, tin, caviar and copper in the case of local traders, and 2
den'gi per rouble on all goods in the case of foreigners.22.
Pomernoe was a special tax charged on the sale of grain, hops, gunpowder and a
variety of food products, from fish to nuts, possibly because checking the quantities
involved was considered more difficult and required special care. It was paid by the
seller at a rate of 1 den'ga per 4 cheti, and this applied both in Beloozero in 1551,
and in Kholmogory in 1588. This rate had doubled to half a den'ga per cheti (i.e. 2
den'gi per 4 cheti) by 1606, but was still quite low, for the weight of the chet’ or

purchaser left the gostinyi dvor.
19 Akty sobrannye v bibliotekakh, I, 409; Il, 146. Furs could also be classed as “weighables’,
presumably in the case of a sack of odd pieces, rather than pelts. Osokin, 66-70.
20 §.G.D.D., Il, 57. Osokin, 72-80. See Yakovlev, I, 38, 81, 84, 85 and pass. for the rate of the
pod'em in Ustyug Velikii in 1633-4..

21 $.G.G.D., II, 90-91. Akty sobrannye v bibliotekakh, 1, 409. No difference, however, was made
in Kholmogory in 1588 between the method of payment accepted from purchasers and sellers.

22 Akty sobrannye v bibliotekakh, Il, 146.

466

Trade with Muscovy

chetvert' was then something of the order of 12 pud (196.56 kg).23 Finally mytnaya

was charged, but only to the seller and at the rate of 1 den'ga per rouble.
On the sale and purchase of other goods two main taxes, mytnaya and tamga,
seem to have been paid, but there was also arshinnoe to pay on pieces of material
after they had been checked for length.24 Mytnaya, or zamytnaya, was charged on all
goods brought to market or passing through a town on their way to market, and the
rate of only 1 den'ga per rouble applied both to Muscovites and foreigners.25 The
tamga, on the other land, was a real burden, and apparently so valuable that the
earlier rulers of Moscow are known to have bequeathed it to their sons in order that
the proceeds be divided among them. The rate of this tax, which was taken as soon as
a merchant arrived in a town with goods to sell, did not change between 1571 and
1606, when it was 1 den'ga per rouble for local people, 4 den'gi for out-of-town
merchants and 7 den'gi for foreigners. However, Hajji Awaz and his Khwarazmian
companions were charged the higher rate of 11 den'gi per rouble on their sales in
Astrakhan in 1585.26 Additional taxes were paid by both sides when horses or cattle
changed hands. These taxes included the registration fee or pischee and the pyatno or
pyatennoe which was acknowledged by an official receipt stamped on the animal,
using tar. According to Osokin the rate in Novgorod in 1586 was 1 den'ga each for
the pyatno and half a den'ga each for the pischee in the case of local merchants, and
twice that amount in the case of foreign and out-of-town merchants. This distinction
was not applied in Kholmogory in 1588 where the pyatno payments were said to be 1
den'ga each (for all merchants), nor in Kargopol' east of the Urals in 1598 where
Customs officials were told to collect the pyatennoe (sic) at the rate of 2 den'gi

each.27
Since tamga payments related to the sale or purchase of goods, it seems likely that
merchants who failed to sell their goods were reimbursed. However, before they

23 Akty sobrannye v bibliotekakh, 1, 223, 409; II, 146. Osokin, 75-79. S.G.G.D., Il, 92. The
pomernoe was not charged on small quantities weighing less than a third of a chetvert'. Sakharov,
114. According to Klyuchevskii ("Russkii rubl'", 7, 8) the mediaeval pud was heavier than the
modern one, the difference being one-seventh in the seventeenth century.
24 Knigi Moskovskoi bol'shoi tamozhni, 65, 67. In the two examples available here for 1693-4 the

same amount, i.e. 20 den'gi, was charged in Moscow on two vastly different consignments of
material.
25 Akty sobrannye v bibliotekak, I, 409; Il, 144, 145. Zamytnaya was paid on all sales the value
of which exceeded 1 rouble. S.G.G.D., II, 60. It was paid even on planks of wood floated down
river to a market town. Osokin, 47-49, 18-23, differentiates between myt paid per load and as a

transit tax, and zamyt paid per rouble at the time of sale. Klyuchevskii, Kurs, VI, 206-7, makes a
similar distinction and insists that myt was paid per cart or boat irrespective of the value of the

goods. Shumakov, 250-1, 258, also describes myt as a tax paid per load (and not according to
value), but says that it originally applied both to the right of bringing goods to market, and also
to the right of taking them through on transit. After the introduction of the tamga, he adds, myt
became a mere transit due.
26 §.G.G.D., Il, 53-56. Akty sobrannye v bibliotekakh Il, 144-6. Osokin, 87-106. Materialy,
106. Fekhner, 103-4, explains that tamga was sometimes paid well before the goods were sold
and was later returned, or else deducted from the merchant's further payments of taxes if he had
failed to sell his goods.
27 Osokin, 80-85. Other taxes paid on horse sales were the posherstnoe, povodnaya den’ga and
povorotnaya, and there was between 1.5 den'gi and 2 den'gi to pay on the sale of horned cattle
by way of rogovoe and privyaznoe. Akty sobrannye v bibliotekakh, 1, 409. S.G.G.D., I,
USS:

467

Bukharan trade

could leave the town and remove their merchandise from the gostinyi dvor they were
required to pay a special tax called otvoznaya or ot'yavochnaya, which covered the
cost of Customs inspection and which included the sealing of bales after inspection

(uzol'tsovoe).28 Otvoznaya payments could be quite sizeable. Thus Hajji Awaz and
his party were charged the high rate of 5.5 den'gi per rouble, or half as much as they
would have paid by way of tamga if they had sold their goods. Surprisingly enough,
however, they did not complain about this, nor about the transport taxes paid between
Astrakhan and Kazan’. What they did complain about was the excessively high rate at
which they had to pay proezhdeva when they went through Kazan’ in transit.
Proezhdeva was the combined payment of transit dues (propusknaya/proezzhaya
poshlina) plus the declaration fee (yavlennaya/yavochnaya) which was demanded
from all merchants in transit, such as the Muscovite merchants who took Central

Asian goods ‘past Kazan' in 1585. According to Hajji Awaz the usual scale was 1
den'ga per rouble for Muscovites and twice that amount for Central Asians but in
Kazan' his party was charged 18 den'gi on ‘weighables’ and 11 den'gi on other
goods, an irregularity which he begged the Tsar to have put right. Tsar Fedor
accepted his claim as valid, and ordered the voevoda to pay back the excess charge,
but the Kazan’ official was so unruly that he ignored the Tsar's instructions. As a
result Hajji Awaz was unable to leave the town ‘and three years later he was still there,

awaiting reimbursement and begging to be allowed to return to his country.29
The further a merchant travelled within Muscovy the more proezzhaya and
yavlennaya he was required to pay, as well as additional transport fees and travel
taxes payable on bridges and ferries. It was therefore more economical for him to
travel straight from the khanate to the town in whiclvhe wanted to trade. The building
of new towns along the Volga during the latter part of the sixteenth century meant that
travel from Astrakhan to Moscow was safer, but it also meant that additional
payments of proezzhaya-cum-yavlennaya were required from merchants at Tsaritsyn,
Saratov and Samara before they reached Kazan’, and also at Svyazhsk, Cheboksary,

Vasil'gorod and Nizhnii Novgorod beyond Kazan'. Another problem on this route
was presented by the ‘proezhdeva’ payments in Moscow, which were four times as
high as those required en route. However, since goods generally fetched a better price
there, merchants did not resent this. Hajji Awaz certainly voiced no objection to the 8

den'gi per rouble taken on his goods when he entered the capital.3°
After 1585 tolls and dues were not the only difficulties faced by Bukharans and
other Central Asian merchants in Muscovy. Firstly, the Tsars began to discourage
28 A./., Ill, 258. Materialy, 133, 136. Central Asians who had failed to sell their goods in
Muscovy and took them back were charged 2 den'gi per rouble in 1620. Yakovlev, pass. The rate
of the ot’ezd, or leaving tax, charged to Muscovites in Ustyug Velikii in the 1630s and 1650s
varied between 12 and 25 den'gi per merchant. According to Kafengauz, 21, in the eighteenth
century only foreigners were expected to pay ot'yavkaya (otvoznaya). Osokin, 85-87, 121.
Shumakov, 160, equates uzolki with otvoz. Fekhner, 103, calls uzol'tsovoe uzlovaya.

29 Materialy, 106, 98, 107. Akty sobrannye v bibliotekakah, 1, 410-1. Special rates of transit
dues were paid on boats. A./., III, 256.
30 Fekhner, 104. Geraklitov, 132, 138, 141, 153. The documents reproduced by Yakovlev in I, 81,

87, 89, 94, show that in 1633-4 the entrance fee paid on arrival at Ustyug Velikii on the Dvina
was 16 den'gi for merchants from Kholmogory, Pechora, Kazan’, Vologda and Moscow. See A.L,
IV, 117 for Tsar Aleksei’s warning to the Astrakhan voevoda not to value goods at the prices
which they fetched in Moscow, for this was far too high.

468

Trade with Muscovy

them from travelling to Moscow. It is not known when the first restriction on such
travel was introduced, but in a letter to the Kazan' voevoda in November 1585 Tsar
Fedor referred to a previous ukaz to this effect issued earlier in his reign. He
reminded the official that no ‘teziki’ should be allowed to travel beyond Kazan’, save
for those travelling in the suite of a Bukharan or ‘Yurgenchi’ ambassador. Any
Central Asian goods which the teziki brought as far as Kazan' were to be taken to
Moscow by Muscovite merchants who would then be required to pay the relevant
transit dues in Kazan'.'In the light of this ruling it seems likely that Hajji Awaz and
his party had only been allowed to go to Moscow from Kazan' because they were
thought to belong to the suite of the Khwarazmian ambassador who went there in
November 1585, together with ‘Abdallah II's ambassador, Muhammad

‘Ali.3!

A second problem arose from the regulations declaring certain goods zapovednye.
Some time between 1586 and 1589 Tsar Fedor withdrew wax from the open market,

a measure already taken thirty years earlier by his father, no doubt because wax was
much in demand among his deeply religious subjects, not so much for domestic
lighting, as for use during church services. This regulation took Hajji Awaz and his
party entirely by surprise, since they had purchased large quantities in Kazan’,
melting it down and pouring it into a big circular hole in the ground to store it until
they were ready to leave for Khwarazm. When they were told that they were holding
it illegally, and that they must surrender it all to the voevoda at 1.5 roubles per pud,
although it had cost them 2.5 roubles per pud, they at once appealed to the Tsar. They
explained that they would be ruined if they had to part with it so cheaply, for they
were already in debt owing to their long stay in Kazan' and to the excessive duties
which they had been forced to pay. But it is not known how the Tsar responded to

this appeal.32
By 1589 the list of zapovednye tovary appears to have grown substantially. In a
letter listing partly-processed hides,?3 fresh honey, spicy wine, silver coins, suits of
armour, squirrel fur coats, wax and German slaves as items which the ambassadors

from Bukhara and Wazir were allowed to take back without paying dues, Tsar Fedor
stressed that they should not be permitted to buy more than the stated quota of “these
goods and...other forbidden goods’. Since one of the items listed was wax, it might
perhaps be assumed that all of them were considered as zapovednye tovary.
However, it seems unlikely that hides or squirrel fur coats would have been
restricted, unless production was at a low level at the time, for they were neither
particularly valuable, nor rare. The production and sale of wine, on the other hand, is
known to have been generally reserved to the Tsar and his agents but, according to
Kostomarov, wine and honey only became restricted goods under Fedor's successor.
That leaves silver and German slaves as the most likely zapovednye tovary on this
list, quite apart from suits of armour and gerfalcons, to which Tsar Fedor made a
particular reference in the same letter, explaining that no gerfalcons or suits of armour
were to be purchased in addition to those which he was sending as gifts. In relation to
the export of German slaves he stressed that his permission only applied to
unbaptized German slaves, i.e. Germans not baptized into the Orthodox faith. By
implication he was unwilling to tolerate the export of either Muscovites or suitably
31 Materialy, 97-8.
32 Materialy,

107.
33 Mostovye, i.c., tanned and dried, but not fully-processed.

469

Bukharan trade

baptized Germans.
The fact that only a limited number of German slaves could be exported was
repeated many times by Tsar Fedor. Thus he mentioned it to the Muscovite escorts
provided for Iranian ambassadors in 1590 and also in 1596. In 1596 the returning
ambassador,

Andi Bek, and the merchants in his suite were allowed to purchase

German slaves only on condition that they had not been ‘christened’, and although
Andi Bek was permitted to buy 16 such slaves, his merchants were limited to a total
of 10. On this occasion a list of the zapovednye tovary acquired by the party was
appended to the Tsar's instructions, and he made it clear that they must not add to the
suits of armour, helmets, tin, lead, bow and arrow sets, knives and ‘newly-restricted

iron goods’ which they had purchased with his permission in Moscow. Five years
later, in May 1601, ‘honey, tin, lead and other (metal goods)’, were listed as

zapovednye tovary, together with gerfalcons and hawks.*4
These restrictions, and the extra expense incurred when taking goods through
Muscovy, did not curtail the Bukharans' activities. In 1598 several Bukharan
merchants are known to have traded in Kazan'. Others went directly to Ufa and to
Samara, which was founded in 1586. Trade with this town was temporarily
interrupted during the Time of Troubles, after it was reported that Central Asian
merchants were being robbed and beaten to death. A group of 900 Bukharans and
‘Yurgenchi’ merchants who were on their way to Samara reportedly gave up up their
undertaking as a result. But as soon as news came of Mikhail Romanov's accession
the merchants of the khanate resumed their trading ventures. In December 1613 a
caravan of about 300 intrepid Bukharans and ‘Yurgenchis’ arrived in Samara,
together with Imam Quli's envoy Khwajah Nauruz. And when they were satisfied
that Tsar Mikhail was truly in control, they at once sent to the khanate to encourage

their fellow traders to follow suit.3°
In the first years of Tsar Mikhail's reign these eastern traders were made very
welcome. They were even allowed to visit Moscow, although as a precaution the
voevoda of Kazan' was instructed in 1614 to send the Ambassadors' Department.a
list of names of all the merchants who wished to continue to Moscow, and to await
instructions. In December 1616 he sent a list of 15 new arrivals, among whom there
were three Bukharans who had come from Astrakhan, and one who had come via
Ufa, and permission was granted for all of them to trade either in Kazan' or in
Moscow. Three years later the situation had changed, presumably because Bukharans
and other Central Asians had flooded into Moscow.

In December

1619, after

receiving a similar list from Kazan’, in which there were 16 Bukharans out of a total
of 42 merchants originating in Iran, Shemakha, Crimea and Khwarazm, Tsar Mikhail
ruled that only those merchants who carried velikie (major or valuable) goods should
be permitted to continue to Moscow. In case his message was not clear enough he
explained that those who carried ‘small’ or insignificant goods would not be allowed
into the capital. Those who were granted the necessary permission would have to use
their own horses and would not be given carts, he added, which implied that until
then transport facilities had always been provided for Central Asian traders and that he
had decided to discontinue this costly practice on realising that such traders would

34 Materialy, 105-6. Kostomarov, 218. Pamyatniki, XX, 152, 310-1; XXI, 57.
35 Tbid., XXI, 101, 165, 171, 173. Geraklitov, 132.
470

Trade with Muscovy

come to Moscow regardless.36
Tsar Mikhail's need to economize and to increase his income was reflected in
another measure which affected all Central Asians, and not only those merchants who
wanted to come to the capital. Some time in 1619 he raised the rate of the sales tax
which applied to their goods. And although he kept the transit dues at 2 den'gi per
rouble, by December of that year Central Asian were having to pay 13 den'gi per
rouble in Kazan’ on ‘soft’ goods such as silk, all types of materials and hides, and 18

den'gi per rouble on weighables.37
The exact date when the new rate was introduced is not known but the lower rate
still applied in Astrakhan in early December 1618. According to a number of
Armenian merchants who had been living at the Central Asians’ gostinyi dvor in
Astrakhan and had recently moved out, foreign visitors were then paying a total of 14
den'gi per rouble on their goods. The Armenians had been paying this fee while
living in the gostinyi dvor and they explained that the 14 den'gi in question covered
the tamozhennaya poshlina (i.e. the sales tax or tamga),>8 the myt' (1 den'ga per
rouble paid for permission to trade), the fee paid for the interpreters’ services and a
tax called snosnye, the proceeds of which may have been allocated to the staff who
carried the goods in and out of the inn. Not surprisingly, since they were no longer
living in the inn, the Armenians felt that they should not pay for the interpreters, nor
for the services of the other staff, and that their transactions should be assessed at the
same rate as the resident traders (posadskie lyudi) among whom they now lived.?9 In
view of this they asked to be allowed to pay the tamozhennaya poshlina at the lower
tariff of 6 den'gi, and this was granted. They were then presumably released from the
snosnye payments and the interpreters’ fees, but they must have continued to pay the

myt' on their transactions, for this was a universal tax with a single tariff.4°
After 1619 the new taxation rates continued to be enforced and access to Moscow
continued to be restricted to those who brought “major and richly-decorated’ goods to
the capital, but Bukharans and ‘Kizilbash’ merchants who brought ‘smaller’ (less
valuable) items to Kazan' were allowed to go on to Nizhnii Novgorod.*2 When a
number of such merchants reached Moscow in 1622, Tsar Mikhail was quick to write
and express his displeasure to the voevoda of Kazan', Odoevskii. Not only had
Odoevskii allowed merchants with minor goods to go to Moscow, but they had been
sent to the capital unaccompanied by the officials, pristavy, whose duty was to look
after them and to prevent them from having too much contact with the local people.
Worse still, they had not been given the regulation transit passes listing their goods
and, perhaps because they had been allowed to flout so many of the established

36 Pamyatniki, XXII, 275,-278, 640-4.
37 Yaterialy, 134-6. ‘Soft’ goods included furs and hides, if sold by number and not by weight.
38 Materialy, 106. Its rate, as mentioned above, was 11 den'gi in 1585.

39 See further about the posadskie lyudi below.
40 Pamyatniki, XXII, 713-4. P.S.Z., I, 294. The only other reference found to the snosnye so far is

in a ruling of 1653 when Tsar Aleksei ruled that the snosnaya (the feminine singular form of the
plural snosnye), should continue to be paid at the previous rate of 2 den'gi per rouble on the
purchase of merchandise belonging to royal trading agents. The rate of this tax must have been
lower in 1618, if the Armenians were right and 14 den'gi covered all three taxes, plus the
interpreters’ fees.
41 yaterialy, 136. S bol’shimi i s uzorochnymi tovary.

42 Tbid., 136-7.
471

Bukharan trade

regulations, they had presumed to petition the Tsar on their arrival in Moscow, asking
to be exempted from the usual dues.
The Tsar's reprimand to Odoevskii reveals a great deal, not only about the
ambiguous attitude of the Muscovite authorities towards Iranian and Central Asian
merchants, but also about the attitude of the traders themselves. Whilst the authorities
were anxious to ensure their safety, they also wanted to prevent them from making
contact with ordinary Muscovites. And as for the merchants, they had come to expect
the provision of an escort. They may have even regarded the proezzhaya tolls, and in
particular the high dues charged on arrival in the capital, as a sort of payment for this
service. Therefore when, as on this occasion, the escort failed to materialise, they
attempted to have the tolls remitted in protest.
In a letter which has not survived but the contents of which are paraphrased in
Odoevskii's reply, Tsar Mikhail not only reprimanded the voevoda. He reiterated his
earlier instructions and made it quite clear that only merchants carrying important and
valuable goods were allowed to go on to Moscow. Those with ‘small’ (not valuable)
goods, on the other hand, could go as far as Nizhnii Novgorod (and no further).
Turning next to the payment of trade dues, an important source of income for his
Treasury, the Tsar stressed that all merchants were to be taxed on their goods,
whatever the value of these goods. However, the need to protect Bukharans and other
Central Asians from abuse was such that he apparently thought it necessary to warn
the voevoda against harassing traders, causing them offence or demanding excessive
dues. A final point of interest in these instructions relates to the provision of transport
facilities for Central Asian traders. The earlier ruling about the non-provision of carts
was reinforced, but foreigners were no longer restricted to travelling to Moscow on
horseback. They were now permitted to hire carts, boats, or other means of transport,
which meant that they would be able to carry much larger quantities of goods to the
capital.
Although from then on Bukharans and others would no longer be able to count on
free transport, this did not mean that the voevody would refuse to help them. On the
contrary, according to Kostomarov, if a merchant's boat sank, the voevody readily
helped to raise it from the river. This, however, was no longer a free service, for a
voevoda would take one-tenth of the boat's contents for the Treasury, this sum being

used, no doubt, as part payment for his services.43
To sum up, the general purpose of the 1622 regulations was not to discourage
Bukharans and other Central Asian merchants. The Tsar certainly wanted them to be
well treated and protected from abuse, but, because of their increasing numbers, he
could no longer afford to be so generous. Carts, therefore, would no longer be
provided. An official escort, however, was deemed essential for security reasons, but

it would only be made available to those carrying valuable goods, on the assumption
that the taxes recovered would more than cover this expense.
In December 1622 Odoevskii answered Tsar Mikhail, saying that he had fully
understood and carefully followed his directives. In fact, however, the Kazan’
voevoda appears to have exceeded his authority in November and December by

permitting a number of ‘teziki’ to continue up the Volga well beyond Nizhnii
Novgorod, in fact as far as Yaroslavl’. This being the case, he took great pains to
show that in other ways his behaviour had been unimpeachable. He declared that he
43 Kostomarov, 126.

472

Trade with Muscovy

had issued the merchants with proezzhye gramoty (travelling papers/transit passes)
only as far as Nizhnii Novgorod and Yaroslavl'. He had also written to the voevoda
of Yaroslavl' making it clear that the merchants should not be allowed to continue to
Moscow, or any other town, without specific instructions from the Tsar. He himself
had certainly sent no Bukharan or Kizilbash tezik to Moscow. If they had got there,
they must have done so with the connivance of the voevody of Nizhnii Novgorod, or
those of Yaroslavl. Odoevskii made it clear that he had served the Tsar equally well
with regard to taxation. He had issued strict orders to all Customs officials to take
dues only according to the guidelines established by the Tsar. He had also warned
them against imposing extra taxes on the merchants at will. Finally he maintained that,
together with his colleagues in Kazan’, he had taken all measures necessary to protect
the foreign teziki from any type of coercion or violence.“
Tsar Mikhail's determination to protect merchants in general, and teziki in
particular, from the voevody's extortions led him, three years later, to issue another
set of instructions aimed at discouraging bribery as well as intimidation, while
ensuring that merchants got a fair price for their goods. This time it was the turn of
the Astrakhan voevody Petr Golovin and Aleksei Zubov to be warned against
allowing the harassment of merchants, or causing them difficulties. They were also
ordered to buy the goods they needed from teziki, Bukharans, Muscovites and others
at the market place, and not in their palace. The Tsar was no doubt convinced that in
such an exposed public place as a market they would have to pay a proper price and
would be unable to force traders to part with the goods at a reduced or even a derisory
price. Other measures in these instructions related to security and showed that the
Tsar was generally suspicious of Muslim traders as possible spies on behalf of the
Ottomans. The voevody were told therefore to prevent Noghays or other foreigners
from having too close a look at the fortifications of Astrakhan. They were to keep a
careful check on the harbour and on the traders’ inns in order to prevent Iranians,

Bukharans and others from smuggling in any Turkish subject. Finally, in the interests
of greater security, they had to ensure that the merchants brought with them a special
travel document from their country of origin. This proezzhaya gramota, the Tsar
explained, should clearly list their names and towns of origin, as well as the numbers
in their party, and they should be warned against bringing in or smuggling in men
from any country but their own. The penalty for such an offence, or for coming over
without the proezzhaya gramota, would be disqualification from trade and expulsion
from Muscovy. And as for the men who might have been smuggled in, they would be
executed.
In the same set of instructions, issued in June 1625, the Astrakhan voevoda was
reminded that no zapovednye tovary, listed here as gold, silver, copper, iron, tin,
arrowheads, arrows, nails, axes and others, were to be sold to Astrakhan Tatars or to

teziki. And the export of money, silver and gold was specifically forbidden. The fact
that German slaves, gerfalcons, wax and honey were not mentioned on this occasion

must not be taken to indicate that such items had become freely available to
merchants. It seems more likely that Tsar Mikhail's prime concern at the time was
defence, and that he accordingly took particular care to list all items which could be
used as military hardware by his enemies. The inclusion of gold and silver in the list
of zapovednye tovary was particularly relevant, because bullion was in very short

44 Materialy, 136-7.
473

Bukharan trade

of the wars which had followed the Time of Troubles. The prohibition of their export
meant that Bukharans were forced to take back goods instead of money to the
khanate, but this was probably no great hardship for them, because the hides,
wooden dishes and woollen cloth which they purchased freely in Muscovy were
much prized in the khanate.
Two more measures included in these instructions show that the Tsar had decided
to keep a much closer check on foreign traders in Astrakhan. Firstly, the voevoda was
to make sure that no Bukharans or others entered the harbour or the traders’ inn
secretly, this being as much a precaution against subversive elements as a measure to
prevent any loss to the Treasury through evasion of entry and inspection fees.
Secondly, the voevoda was to conduct a census of all the teziki arriving in Astrakhan.
By finding out, not only the merchants’ place of origin, but also the length of their
stay, their destination on departure, the goods they traded in, and whether or not they
remained in Astrakhan throughout their stay in Muscovy, the authorities hoped to be
able to forecast the sort of income which might accrue to the Treasury from the
activities of Bukharans and others. The information gathered could then be taken into
consideration when formulating a future economic policy.*>
The restrictions allowing into Moscow only those merchants who brought large
consignments of valuable goods did not prevent the expansion of Bukharan and
Central Asian trade in Muscovy. Their Muscovite competitors from Moscow, Kazan'
Nizhnii Novgorod ‘and all (other towns)’ complained bitterly to the Tsar in 1627 that
Bukharans, ‘Kizylbash’ and teziki no longer remained in Astrakhan and Kazan’ as
they had done previously. They were going all over Muscovy and even as far as
Siberia, or else sending agents there. They had stolen the market from local traders
and they were preventing even the Tsar's goods from being sold. Tsar Mikhail was
urged to restrict their activities to Astrakhan and Kazan’, for his own benefit as well
as that of local traders, but he does not seem to have taken much notice of this petition
and his general attitude to the Bukharans and Central Asians did not change.*°
His instructions to the voevody of Astrakhan in 1628-9 differed little from those
of 1625 and showed even more concern to ensure the general satisfaction of Central
Asian and other traders. Thus Kurakin and Korob'in were warned against allowing
Muscovite, Noghay and tezik merchants to be subjected to harassment or violence.
They were told to be ‘kind’ to traders and to make sure that neither the spring nor the
autumn caravan to Kazan' was delayed again, as it was the previous year, when the
merchants’ boats had been stuck in the frozen river near Samara, occasioning great
losses to them and also to the Tsar's Treasury. The voevody were urged to see to the
merchants’ safety by only permitting them to go up the Volga with a caravan, and by
providing this caravan with an armed escort whose task would be to defend them
against the Cossacks. The Tsar also dealt with general security matters, repeating
earlier instructions about access to fortifications and the smuggling in of Turks by
foreigners. Once again he ruled that Central Asian traders should produce transit
documents from their country of origin if they wanted to trade, which seems to
suggests that his earlier instructions to that effect had so far been disregarded. Next
the prohibition on the sale of zapovednye goods to foreigners was reiterated and
tightened. Russian and Noghay slaves, hawks and gerfalcons, and also harquebusses

45 4.1, Il, 211-4.
46 Shornik dokumentov po istorii SSSR, IV, 93-94.

474

Trade with Muscovy

were added to the previous list and it was made clear that no one, except for a
oli (a monarch's commercial agent), should be permitted to buy the items
ste

Two other clauses arose from Tsar Mikhail's increasing preoccupation with
money matters. The voevody were told not to give the merchants any wine, a
prohibition aimed at curbing expenditure which seems to indicate that until then it had
been the practice to provide merchants with both food and wine. And the Tsar
tightened the regulations applying to the Iranian merchants who travelled to Astrakhan
overland. Possibly because they had somehow avoided paying gruzovaya and
posazhennaya on their arrival in Astrakhan, he decreed that the Shah's agents, as well
as ordinary merchants coming by that route should be stopped outside the town so
that their names and goods could be duly noted. Then, before they could proceed up
the Volga from Astrakhan, they should be required to pay either otvoznaya plus
proezzhaya poshlina if they had not sold their goods in Astrakhan, or a ‘big poshlina’
if they had sold their goods. No indication is available as to the rate of these taxes, so
one can only speculate that the rates applicable were still 5.5 den'gi per rouble for the
otvoznaya as in 1585, 60 to 120 den'gi according to the type of boat used plus 1
den'ga per person for the posazhennaya as in 1588, and either 13 den'gi per rouble or
18 den'gi per rouble for the sales tax as in 1619 and 1620.
The import of wine was mentioned next, the Tsar ruling that no merchant should
be allowed to bring it into Astrakhan unless it was entered on his transit documents. If
he did so, the wine should be confiscated. This ruling arose from the fact that wine
was a monopoly item, sold only in government drinking-houses (kabaki), and the
Tsar wanted to ensure that there was no secret trading by foreigners, and no secret
‘smoking of wine’ by his subjects. Finally the Tsar decreed that, although merchants
from Iran, Gilan and the khanate were to be accomodated (exclusively) in the
Bukharan and Gilan traders' inns of Astrakhan, they should not be allowed to trade
within those premises, either with Muscovites, or with ‘tent-dwelling’ (yurtovskie)
nomadic Tatars. The venue for such deals was to be the Tatar market. The reason for
this surprising new ruling was not stated, but it may have been part of a general
attempt to discourage too much contact between the Tsar's subjects and foreigners.
The influx of traders into Astrakhan probably made conditions in the inns rather too
cramped for effective surveillance of their trading operations and the Tsar wanted to
be sure that the proper sales dues were paid.47
Little is known about the treatment of ordinary Bukharan merchants in the
following 20 years. However, a good idea of the basic rate of tax paid by traders
before they began their transactions can be gathered from a letter of the Astrakhan
voevoda in 1644 in which he listed both the amounts that ought to have been paid,
and the amounts that had indeed been paid, on the goods brought there by various
Central Asian envoys during the previous ten years. Although no request for payment
had generally been issued on the understanding that they were exempt from dues, as
were all other official envoys, the amounts in question had been carefully entered in
case the Tsars issued instructions to the contrary. The rate applicable was something
between 16 and 19 den'gi per rouble, or little more than the rates charged in
Astrakhan in 1618, and in Kazan' in 1619. In the case of the Khwarazmian Nazar
Pakul in 1634, his assessment worked out at about 15 den'gi per rouble, including a

47 4.]., Il, 254-67.
475

Bukharan trade

charge for transport on the busa which seems to have been 1.5 den'gi per rouble.
One exceptional case was that of the Bukharan Hajji Ata Quli who was charged
under 7 den'gi per rouble in 1633. This remarkably low rate was really due to the fact
that his arrival had taken the Astrakhan officials completely by surprise. A careful
search of the records had been ordered, but it turned out that no Bukharan commercial
agent had ever visited the town. Hajji Ata Quli confirmed this and said that the
Bukharan kupchiny normally travelled overland to Samara and Kazan’. Since they
had no precedent to follow, and since Imam Quli had asked for his agent to be sent to
Kazan' and Moscow and had demanded that all Customs or transit dues on his goods
should be waived, the voevody had decided to charge Hajji Ata Quli only a minimal
fee and to grant the khan's request. First, however, they carefully inspected and listed
his goods, then they calculated the duties that were chargeable on them and made him
promise in writing that he would pay retrospectively any fees which might be required
by the Tsar. After he left they wrote to the Tsar to ask for clear instructions for the
future and to explain that they had followed a previous ruling which said that those
traders who did not want to trade in Astrakhan, but wished to take their goods to the
towns on the ‘upper’ Volga should be allowed to do so because they would be made
to pay ‘big’ dues in those towns. The fee charged to the agent may have covered the
cost of inspection to ensure that the bales had not been disturbed since they had been

loaded on the busa in Karagan.48
In 1634, a few months after Hajji Ata Quli had caused such a stir in Astrakhan,
Bukharans must have been concerned to hear that tobacco, which was one of the
items they carried to Muscovy, had been declared a forbidden item, banned by the
Tsar from the open market. Foreigners as well as Muscovites were forbidden to keep
any, to ‘drink’ it in their houses or to sell it on pain of death. Would-be defaulters
were warned that they would be put to death, and their houses and possessions would

be forfeited to the Treasury.49
It should be explained that tobacco was frowned upon for religious as well as
practical reasons. Smoking was thought to have some intrinsic connection with the
devil, quite apart from its danger to health and the social and behavioural problems
which its addiction might lead to. Nevertheless the new regulation did not mean the
end of tobacco sales in Muscovy. Although it was believed that tobacco was ‘hated by
God’, Tsar Mikhail and his successors were not averse to making money by selling it
to their subjects, and charging them prohibitive prices often comparable with the price
of gold. They sold it to them either directly, or else through agents who were able to
purchase a concession for the sale of tobacco for a specific period.5°
The new restriction on the range of goods which could be sold in Muscovy did
not deter Bukharans and others from trading there. On the contrary, in a petition to the
Tsar written in about 1643 Muscovite merchants complained that ‘people of every
country (had) shops in Moscow’. They claimed that merchants in the suite of (Central
Asian) ambassadors in Astrakhan paid local Tatars to act as their agents and thus
defraud the Treasury of the higher dues extracted from foreigners. These agents
48 Materialy, 190-3, 141.

49 P.§.Z., I, 154. Baikova, Rol’, 120, makes an erroneous distinction between the penalties imposed
on foreigners and Muscovites.
50 See Klyuchevskii, Kurs, III, 281; Mezhov, Sibirskaya bibliografiya, 1, 43; Sobranie raznykh
zapisok, Il, 92-97; and chapter 15 below.

476

Trade with Muscovy

began by passing off as their own the merchants' zenden’, kindyak, dorogi and other
goods, in order to take them to Moscow. Then on the way to Moscow they paid
transit dues at the lower rate demanded

from Muscovites,

and in Moscow

they

managed to avoid paying even the ordinary sales tax by selling the goods ‘at
crossroads’, i.e. not in the trade rows or the traders' inns where sales were strictly

supervised and taxed.5!
It is not known what action was taken to curb such abuses in so far as they
existed, but it should be noted that the Muscovite merchants’ complaint was part of a
series of complaints to the Tsar against all foreign merchants. The gist of the petitions
of 1627, 1635, 1637, 1646 and 1649, aimed at western as well as eastern merchants,

was that these traders had taken over the internal market and ruined the Muscovites.
In particular they were said to be selling goods retail in shops and warehouses in
defiance of the rules which restricted foreigners to trading wholesale and only within
the confines of the gostinyi dvor. Foreign merchants were also accused of trading
among themselves, thus by-passing their Muscovite counterparts altogether, and the
Tsar was urged to confine their activities to the frontier towns. Tsar Mikhail did not
respond to their complaints and suggestions, but his son and successor Aleksei took
energetic action as early as 1646. He decreed that all foreign traders should pay dues
on the sale of their goods at the same rate as the Muscovites themselves, i.e. 6 den'gi
per rouble on non-weighables and 8 den'gi per rouble on weighables. They would
also be charged transit dues if they wanted to take goods from Arkhangel'sk to
Moscow, and these rules would apply to all foreigners, even the English, who had
originally benefited from total exemption and who, since 1625, were only liable to
pay dues on 50% of their goods. For the Bukharans this meant in fact a reduction in
dues which no doubt they were happy to pay. But the English traders evaded these
payments. They were even accused in 1648 of importing tobacco and silk secretly and
they were punished in 1649 by being restricted to trading and living solely in

Arkhangel'sk. >2
Meanwhile in early 1647 a serious crisis occurred which put an end for some time

to trade between the khanate and Muscovy. The crisis was sparked off by the
unwelcome behaviour of the new ruler of Khwarazm, Abu ’1-Ghazi, who, in August
1646, suddenly attacked a number of Muscovite merchants making their way to
Bukhara via Khiva. The merchants were first robbed of all their goods on his orders,

then he had them placed under arrest, and finally he threatened them with slavery and
death. Aba ’1-Ghazi's unexpected show of hostility towards the Muscovites probably
stemmed from his resentment of Nadir Muhammad who had taken over Khwarazm in
1643. Having been prevented from seizing the throne in Khiva for more than two
years, Abu ’l-Ghazi may have wanted to punish Nadir Muhammad and his people by
stopping the flow of supplies from Muscovy to the khanate. And although he did so
at a time when Nadir Muhammad had already lost Bukhara and Balkh and had fled to
Iran for help, he achieved what he had set out to do. For when Tsar Aleksei was

51 TsGADA, fond 109, op.1, 1641 no.2, list 173.
52 See Bazilevich, "Kollektivnye chelobit'ya", 108, 114-6, 118, 119, for the complaints lodged
against foreign traders; Bantysh-Kamenskii, Obzor, I, 93, 106, 107, 111, 113, 114, and Smirnov
P.P., "Ekonomicheskaya politika", 383, for the privileges granted to English merchants and their
gradual removal; Smirnov P., Posadskie lyudi, 35, for the restrictions introduced in 1646. N.B.

The houses and possessions of the English in Muscovy were confiscated in June 1649 in
retaliation for the execution of Charles I.

477

Bukharan trade

informed of the outrage some months later, he decided to retaliate, not only against
Khwarazm,

but also against Bukhara.

gave

orders

for the Khwarazmian

ambassador and the merchants of both countries to be detained in Astrakhan and to be
prevented from leaving the town until his own nationals were returned.>3
It is not known how long the Central Asian merchants were kept in Astrakhan,
but the crisis appears to have been over in early 1649, for in the spring of that year
Tsar Aleksei urged the Astrakhan voevody, Ivan Golitsyn and Semen Pozharskii, to
be ‘welcoming and affectionate’ towards the commercial envoys of the rulers of Iran,
Bukhara and ‘Yurgench’. The Tsar, who had problably realised that he needed to
raise money for his empty Treasury, made it clear that dues should be taken from
them ‘according to instructions and as done previously’. He warned the voevody
against exacting unnecessary payments, allowing sharp practices or intimidation, or
even trading directly with the envoys. Fairness, he stressed, should be preserved at
all costs. The Tsar does not appear to have expected many ordinary traders to come
over from the khanate, or from Khwarazm, for-his néxt instructions referred only to
those Iranians who might travel to Astrakhan in order to “trade for profit’ and who,
from the context, were clearly expected also to have been sent as the Shah's
commercial agents. The voevody were instructed to value their goods “properly, and
not at Moscow prices as (their) predecessors had done’. On those items which might
be their own personal property they were to pay “high dues’, or presumably the trade
dues exacted from foreigners, and orders were given for transit dues to be charged if
any of them should leave Astrakhan to trade up the Volga.
Turning next to the range of goods generally available to merchants and envoys,
Tsar Aleksei introduced a new restriction which he applied not only to Iranians, but
also to Bukharans and Khwarazmians. He decreed that none of them should be
allowed to take slaves out of the country unless they produced a special licence listing
the slaves that could be taken out. Golitsyn and Pozharskii were instructed to check
this carefully before permitting them to embark on the busa. They were told that
envoys and ordinary traders had been buying large numbers of slaves surreptitiously
and taking them out without the knowledge of the boyars, thereby no doubt causing a
loss to the Treasury through unpaid sales dues. Others had asked the Tsar's
permission in Moscow, but they had taken out Noghays in such numbers as to
‘empty’ their encampments, which led to complaints from the Noghay princes *4
That same year, in order to protect Muscovite traders, Tsar Aleksei issued a
general set of economic regulations (the Ulozhenie of 1649) which showed that he

had taken their numerous petitions into account. He gave local town dwellers the
exclusive right to manufacture goods and to trade in Muscovy, he decreed that
foreigners were not allowed to own shops or to sell goods retail in Muscovy, and he
abolished the privileges of the Muscovy Company. At the same time the prohibition
concerning the possession or sale of tobacco was reiterated, and the Tsar added that
all those caught importing the forbidden herb, whether Muscovites or foreigners,
would be compelled under torture to reveal their accomplices, after which they would

53 AI, IV, 49-50. Materialy, 201-2, 327-8.
54 A.1., IV, 117-8. P.S.Z., IV, 31. The purchase of slaves as such was not prohibited. The Tsar was

more concerned that the sale should be registered. Tsar Alexei's ruling of 1649 would in fact be
recalled in 1700 in the following words: ‘all, except boyars, were permitted to buy either male or
female Tatar slaves and all (purchases) were to be entered, and no one was allowed to hide slaves

or to fail to declare them’.

478

Trade with Muscovy
be whipped. Those who repeated the offence several times would have their nostrils

cut and would be exiled to Siberia.55

The Ulozhenie was bound to affect Bukharan traders, as would the restriction on
the sale of madder which was introduced during the following year. After enquiring
into the highly profitable madder trade, Tsar Aleksei had begun to consider the idea of
declaring the plant a zapovednyi tovar and he informed the voevoda of Astrakhan of
his plan in June 1650. He had consulted, among others, the former ambassador to
Bukhara, Anisim Gribov, who told him that merchants from the khanate, Gilan and
Iran were going regularly to the Muscovite town of Terki, on the western shores of
the Caspian, to buy the madder grown in the area. Several boatloads of Iranians
travelled there every year for this purpose, madder being particularly valuable because
it was an essential component of all the dyes used for silks and other materials. Tsar
Aleksei therefore asked the Astrakhan voevoda to make further enquiries from local
people as well as Bukharan visitors, but his mind was made up: he would declare the
plant a government monopoly. This would involve building large government
warehouses and recruiting officials to supervise its sale. The price of madder might
well rise as a result, but the Tsar hoped that Central Asian traders would not be

discouraged from coming to purchase it, and he specifically told the Astrakhan
voevoda that Bukharans, ‘Kizilbash’ and Gilanians must continue to come (and trade

in Terki).56
In 1653 in answer to petitions from the various ranks of Muscovite traders a new
and comprehensive set of economic rules was issued by the Tsar. The aim of these
rules was to lighten and simplify the burden of taxation falling upon Muscovite
traders, to eliminate unfair practices and to make the system more practical. Their
implementation was bound to benefit foreign traders, as well as Muscovites, because
the movement of goods throughout the country would be better regulated and
speedier, and the costs incurred would be more predictable. Sweeping changes were
made in this edict, which Aleksandrov calls the Tamozhennyi Ustav.>7

The Tsar began by announcing a change in the tamozhennaya poshlina (Customs
tolls). He explained that this would be taken in future as a rublevaya poshlina based
on the sale price of goods. Its rate would be 10 den'gi per rouble and this would be
charged to the seller of goods, whether the items in question were weighables or nonweighables, and whether the seller was a local man or came from out-of-town.
Having thus abolished the time-consuming practice of differentiating, for taxation
purposes, between the types of goods and the types of merchants involved, Tsar
Aleksei went on to repeal all existing transit dues, rublevye and ‘petty dues of all

types’. No details were given of the precise tolls and dues which he had in mind so
that he had to clarify this pomt the following year. However, it is known that transit
dues and petty tolls were often collected by private individuals, from abbots to
boyars, who paid a lump sum to the Treasury in return for this privilege and made
sure that their expenses were more than generously covered. As for the word
rublevye (i.e. paid per rouble), it might have referred to the pudovshchitsa paid on
weighables and the tax paid on removing goods from a town (otvoznaya), as well as
the two sales taxes (myt'/mytnaya and tamga), for all of them were assessed at so

55 Kafengauz, 17. P.S.Z., I, 153-5.
56 A.J, IV, 141.
57 Aleksandrov, "K voprosu", 134.

479

Bukharan trade

many den'gi per rouble in relation to the value of the goods and they might well have
been known collectively as rublevye.
It was made clear that the Customs officials were not given carte blanche and that
they were expected them to act fairly towards the traders. The Tsar stressed that the
demand for rublevaya poshlina should be based on the actual sale price and his
officials were warned in the most explicit terms that they would be severely punished
if they over-valued the goods presented for sale in order to increase the tax revenue.
The same standard was also expected from traders. They too were warned. They
should not declare false prices for their goods, nor should they hide anything from
Customs inspection. The penalty for both would be confiscation, and repeated
offenders would be whipped pitilessly. Sales ‘on the road’ and away from
government Customs posts were likewise strictly forbidden, but items which were
not meant for immediate sale would not be taxed. They would merely be recorded on
an official list which the merchant could present at the time of sale in order to establish
his bona fide and protect himself from allegations of misrepresentation.
A list then followed of the taxes which had not been abolished and which would
continue to be paid at the existing rates - on bringing furs to market, on setting up
stalls or cabins for the sale of kvas and fish (gbrok), on having pieces of material
checked for length (arshinnoe), on being provided with guards at the gostinye dvory,
as well as pilots and porters on the ferries. Turning next to the tolls payable on ferries
(perevoz), the Tsar carefully redefined them, regulating them in accordance with the
time of year, the size of the river and the traders’ place of residence, so that local
residents were charged less than those residing elsewhere. Similar punctiliousness
was shown in setting the tax to be paid on bridges (mostovshchika)>8 - none was to
be required if a bridge replaced an ancient ford, but if that was not the case, then the
rate was to be identical to that which applied when crossing a small river. As for the
fee required for the use of government warehouses (ambarshchina), it was still
payable at the old rate, but it was made clear that merchants should no longer be
compelled to use them and if they did not wish to do so they not have to pay the tax.
Finally, no doubt in order to discourage merchants selling less valuable goods from
going to Moscow, an additional tax called mytnaya poshlina was introduced at the

high rate of 10 den'gi per rouble to be paid by traders bringing cattle, logs and ‘small

goods’ to the capital.5?
So much for the rules relating to Muscovites. With regard to foreigners the Ustav
was more severe. Their liability was in fact increased, for the sales tax applicable to
them in ‘Moscow and towns other than Arkhangel'sk’ was raised to 12 den'gi per
rouble on the sale price of both weighables and non-weighables, and a new rate of 4
den'gi per rouble was introduced for the proezzhaya poshlina. The rate in
Arkhangel'sk, however, was to remain unchanged (at 6 den'gi on non-weighables
and 8 den'gi on weighables). But in practice, as revealed by the Swedish trader and

58 This tax is more generally known as mostovshchina and was in fact given this name in the edict
of 1654.

59 P.S.Z., I, 292-5. Aleksandrov, as above. Osokin, 117, 126-35, says that ‘from 1652 zamyt,
yavka, gostinoe, povorotnoe, os'mnichee (a fee paid for the right to trade), poryadnoe (a tax paid

on buying goods for resale), pomernoe, pokorechnoe (paid on grain) and others’ were abolished.
He also insists that the rublevaya poshlina of 10 den'gi was only introduced in 1654, which is
incorrect.

480

Trade with Muscovy
commercial attaché De Rodes, who was in Muscovy between 1652 and 1655, the
distinction between weighables and non-weighables remained and the tax on sales
went up everywhere, including Arkhangel'sk. The new rate there was 8 den'gi each
per rouble on non-weighables and 10 den'gi each per rouble on weighables to be paid
by the purchaser and also by the seller. In Moscow the rate was not 12 den'gi, as laid
down in the Ustav, but a little less (11.5 den'gi per rouble) on non-weighables, and
as much as 14 den'gi on weighables. Goods going to Moscow, De Rodes added, had
to pay | den'ga per rouble as gruzovaya (loading tax), plus transport fees on boats,
plus myt' which he described as a tax on bridges and which was 12 to 30 den'gi per
load, but it is not clear whether an additional payment of 4 den'gi per rouble was
required to cover the transit dues mentioned in the Ustav. Although De Rodes does
not say whether the Moscow rate applied to other towns within Muscovy, this can be
assumed, for identical tax provisions were generally made for ‘Moscow and other
towns’, meaning those towns which were not situated on the frontier.
A special clause in the Ustav was devoted to Astrakhan. Tsar Aleksei ruled that,
except for salt which should be taxed at the new rate of 20 den'gi per rouble, the sales
tax should remain unchanged for Muscovites, Iranian teziks and all other foreigners
until such a time as Tsar Aleksei's ambassadors returned from Iran. And in case this
was not clear, he explained that existing tariffs should continue to be charged both on
weighables and on non-weighables. The sales tariff eventually adopted for Astrakhan
is not known but, whether it equalled the tariff established in the Ustav or the ones
which obtained in either Arkhangel'sk or Moscow, and whether or not the new
proezzhaya rates applied there, the general effect of the new regulations cannot have
been as damaging for Bukharans as it was for western traders. In either case the new
rate of the sales tax would have been lower than the 13 and 18 den'gi which they

were paying in 1619 and 1620, although there is no doubt that the increase in the
proezzhaya poshlina would have reduced their margin of profit.6° No doubt the new
tules regarding ferry crossings will have also affected them, but even if the new rate
was higher than the previous ones, they must have preferred to pay a fixed amount
rather than one which could be varied at will and become extortionate.®!
Bukharans therefore continued to go to Moscow, and the authorities continued to
check their transit passes carefully to make sure that neither the numbers of men and
slaves, nor the quantities of goods listed on the passes, were exceeded. Thus in July
1654 the Astrakhan voevoda was told that the goods of all merchants travelling to the
Noghay trade fair should be checked some distance out of town, and that he should
send back to Astrakhan any Bukharan, Indian or Armenian merchant who had

brought greater quantities than those originally declared.®?
Tsar Aleksei's letter to the Astrakhan voevoda came two months after the issuing
of a new edict, the Ustavnaya gramota of 30 April (11 May) 1654, in which the
regulations of the Tamozhennyi ustav of 1653 were reinforced and made quite
explicit. Aware that his instructions were being flouted and that many of the taxes
which he had abolished were still being charged, he made it clear that the taking of
transit dues was strictly forbidden and listed by name many of the other taxes which

60 Thid., I, 294-5. Kurts, "Sostoyanie", 175, 177.

61 Interestingly enough, the examples of large rivers given were the Volga and the Oka which
Bukharans used on their way to Moscow and Kazan’.

62 4.1, IV, 214-6.
481

Bukharan trade

had been farmed out in the past and which he had repealed. He started by referring to
God, and to the wickedness which resulted from the farming out, by many of his
Departments of State (prikazy), of the myt', the mostovshchina (sic), the ferry
crossings (perevozy), the head tax (golovshchina) and many of the transit dues in
towns, villages and on privately-owned land. The recipients had often farmed the
taxes out again and the tax-farmers (otkupshchiki) had cruelly exploited these rights
and tormented ‘the people’. They had charged higher rates than had been authorised,
they had purposely made up rules which enabled them to fine travellers heavily.
Merchants and others had been held up, missing market-days and other opportunities
for selling their goods and incurring such enormous losses that many had given up
their calling. Others had become so poor that they could no longer pay state taxes or
serve the Tsar in any way. The tax-farmers, in contrast, had made a fortune, but their
greed and self-interest was sure to earn them eternal torments, as forecast in the
Gospels. Tsar Aleksei had taken action against them (the previous year) by giving
orders for all their wicked and spurious taxes to be-cancelled. From then on, he
explained, the collection and farming out of certain taxes had been strictly forbidden,
these being the various transit dues and myt', the posazhennoe, prival'noe (a tax for
using a landing-stage), gruzovoe (tax on heavy loads), golovshchina (head tax),
polozovoe (a fixed tax payable on sledges and carts) and all taxes on the sale of fish.
The farming out of taxes on specified foods which he listed at length, and on other
essentials such as coal, tar and tallow candles had also been forbidden although these
taxes would still be paid to the state. And farming out would only permitted in the
future in the case of the beeswax and bathhouse taxes.
In order to avoid any misunderstanding of the Tsar's intentions the edict went on
to say that all taxes previously farmed out as transit taxes myt' and petty dues had
been incorporated into the new torgovaya rublevaya poshlina. The taxes that were
still to be enforced separately were then spelled out as the obrok on saltworks and
fisheries and the ferry dues on the various rivers. Details of the new charges
established in 1653 on ferries and bridges were repeated and it was stressed that no
one should be forced to use either instead of fords, and that no dues applied if the
ferries or bridges served a mill. The edict ended with a threat of divine punishment.
Those who charged too high a rate of tax, who continued to demand the taxes which
had been waived, or who tried to have them farmed out, would be punished by God
in their earthly possessions and would face eternal torments in the life to come.
The Tsar's strongly worded condemnation of these irregular practices was
expected to put an end to them, much to the relief of westerners who, as mentioned

by De Rodes, had been paying sizeable amounts in myt' in 1653.9 Tsar Aleksei's
concern for the welfare of local traders did not, however, extend to foreign traders. In
fact his attitude and that of his agents towards Bukharan traders quite shocked De
Rodes. In his report he wrote that they were ‘treating Bukharans disgustingly,
practically seizing their goods by force at whatever price they wanted’. De Rodes was
referring more particularly to rhubarb. Until 1652 Bukharans had received a high
price for the valuable root in Moscow because Tsar Aleksei wanted them to bring in
large quantities. Then in 1653 rhubarb was apparently declared a monopoly item and

63 P.§.Z., I, 318-21. See further about some of the taxes referred to, and about the edicts of 1653
and 1654, in Materialy, 86; Osokin, 18-31, 117-21; Tikhonov, 277.

482

Trade with Muscovy

its purchase, except by the Tsar and his agents, was forbidden.®4 The Tsar's agents
could therefore buy it at a vastly reduced price which the Bukharan merchants had no
option but to accept.
Despite the loss in profit which this entailed Bukharans continued to bring in
rhubarb to Muscovy and Siberia. They also appear to have sold tobacco in Moscow,
much to the annoyance of the Tsar. When he found out in June 1661 that teziki, as
well

‘Kizylbash’,

Circassian

and

Greeks

traders

were

selling

it in the

Ambassadors’ Hall and the old English ‘money inn’, Tsar Aleksei repeated and
stressed his earlier prohibition on the sale of tobacco. However, although he made it
clear that all foreigners were forbidden to deal in it, he no longer threatened defaulters
with torture or death. Instead, perhaps because he did not want to discourage traders
from coming over altogether, he warned that they would be whipped by the public
executioner and heavily fined.
In October 1661 a new restriction was placed on trade in Astrakhan. Merchants
from Bukhara, Gilan, Yurgench and Iran were strictly forbidden to trade in the
Noghay and Tatar settlements near the town. No exception was admitted to the rule.
The Tsar even ordered the arrest of any Noghay, Tatar or ‘Edisan’ Noghay whom
these eastern merchants might go and visit. There were several reasons for this strict
prohibition. In the first place the nomads' loyalty was suspect. Tsar Aleksei feared
that they might be thinking of transferring their allegiance to Turkey, Crimea or
Bukhara. As he was then at war with the Muslims of Crimea, he particularly feared
direct contact between visiting and local Muslims, as a possible source of subversive
propaganda. In the second place he wanted to make sure that the Bukharans and other
merchants paid proper fees on all trading activities involving the nomads. It was
essential that all transactions should take place in Astrakhan where they could be
properly supervised, and for this reason the prohibition of trade in the encampments
was also extended to all ‘Russians’. Thirdly, he may have wanted to protect the
nomads and to ensure that they were not made to pay inflated prices for Bukharan and
Central Asian goods. Finally, the Tsar may have sought to prevent secret trading in
slaves and other zapovednye tovary in the nomads' encampments.®>
Two months later a new regulation was issued concerning the ownership of
Qalmagq slaves. This resulted from Tsar Aleksei's newly-established good relations
with the Torgout Qalmaq, who had not only fought on his side against Crimea, but
had also recently renewed an earlier oath of vassalage.®® In December 1661 the
Astrakhan Customs officers were instructed to refuse entry to anyone who came to
the town with newly-purchased Qalmaq slaves. Instead of agreeing to register the
slaves, they were told to send the slave-owners, whether Muscovite, Bukharan,

Kizilbash or other, to the local voevoda in order to declare them and have them duly
entered, which was bound to cause unwelcome delay and extra expense. Instructions
64 Kurts, "Sostoyanie", 153. Although no edicts or directives to this effect have been found for that
year, or indeed, for any year between 1649 and 1657, De Rodes's evidence has been taken as
conclusive, for he spent two years in Moscow from 1652 to 1654 in order to investigate the
condition of the Muscovite trade. The earliest evidence available elsewhere is found in the Tsar's

letters to the voevody of Verkhotur'e and Tobol'sk of 1657 in which the import, purchase, sale,
barter or transport of rhubarb, were strictly forbidden on pain of death. P.S.Z., I, 426-7.

65 §.G.G.D., IV, 73. D.A.L, IV, 256.
66 Nefed'ev, 21. In July 1661 Ho Urluk's grandson Punchuk renewed the oath sworn by his father
Daichin in 1654.

483

Bukharan trade

were also to be given to the owners of Qalmaq domestic slaves residing in Astrakhan
that they should have these slaves properly registered, or else face a sentence of

death.67

By this time there was an important colony of settled Bukharans in Astrakhan.
These Astrakhan Bukharans benefited from the lower tax rates applicable to
Muscovites, but were sometimes lumped together with visiting Bukharans in official
communications, because they too engaged in trade and it was thought that they might
connive with their foreign brethren to defraud the Treasury. For this reason several of
the regulations which were aimed at visiting Bukharans, especially those regarding
access to Moscow, were also applied to Astrakhan Bukharans in the latter part of the
seventeenth century. This certainly limited the scope of their activities although,
according to Golikova, they benefited from the privileges granted to foreign residents
and were therefore exempted from the communal tax burden (tyaglo) and from the
corvées which were demanded of Muscovites.®8 Not all Bukharan visitors and
Astrakhan Bukharans engaged in trade, some of them were craftsmen. Thus a certain
Kula Berdeiko (Quli Birdi), who was living in the Bukharan gostinyi dvor of
Astrakhan in 1666, turned out to be a master dyer. He had no difficulty in
transforming plain white brocade into 28 samples of coloured material when he was
asked to do so on behalf of Tsar Aleksei. He produced four types of kindyak, among
which the lekovrovyi/lekoprovyi had the type of silky finish associated with Indian
kindyak, the baftovyi looked like vyboika, and the richly patterned ferespirevyi was
used as a wall hanging. Kula Berdeiko was also able to turn other material supplied to
him into different shades of coloured zenden' and into byaz' of the type made in

Gilan.°?
A year after Kula Berdeiko had thus demonstrated his expertise at the Tsar's
request, a major set of economic regulations was introduced in Muscovy which
favoured local merchants and further increased the burden of tax imposed upon
foreign traders. The main idea behind this Novotorgovyi Ustav was to retain the
benefits of trade in Muscovite hands, an idea pioneered by the exile, Yuri Krijanich,
in his ‘Politika’, and brought to fruition by Aleksei's able minister, OrdinNashchokin. The new regulation was intended to resolve a major crisis due to a
serious shortage of silver and bullion which had resulted from many years of war
against Poland (1654-67) and Sweden. Several expedients had been resorted to since
1654 in order to remedy the situation, but they had met with little success. Tsar
Aleksei had tried to obtain the bullion by selling large consignments of goods to
Holland, he had attempted to buy silver abroad, he had monopolised all major
exports, he had even allowed free trading in wine for three years in order to
encourage the movement of silver in the open market. A more drastic measure had
been the introduction of copper coins in 1656 on a par with silver, to be used for
wages and for all internal trade. But the copper coins were much counterfeited and
they soon lost their parity with silver. By 1662 silver was worth 15 times more than

copper. Trade was on the verge of collapse, for although merchants only received
copper money in exchange for their goods, they were expected to pay their taxes and
trade dues in silver, and they also needed silver for their purchases of foreign goods.

67 A.1., IV, 314.
68 Golikova, 172 See below for more details about tyaglo and corvées.
69 Russko-indiiskie otnosheniya, 154, 156-8. D.A.I., V, 77.

484

Trade with Muscovy

When serious ‘copper riots’ broke out, Tsar Aleksei realised that he would have to
climb down. He took the copper money out of circulation and gave his subjects 10
den’gi of silver for every 200 copper den'gi (1 rouble) handed in. This helped to
restore confidence but the financial situation continued to deteriorate. In 1667 a new
approach was suggested which was more far-reaching and which was designed to
solve the nation's problems in the long term. The necessary bullion would be
acquired in two ways: - by taxing the activities of foreign traders in Muscovy in silver
and gold, and by forcing the Tsar's subjects to give up all their silver and gold.7°
Such was the main aim of the Novotorgovyi Ustav.7!
It was achieved in several ways. Firstly, the Tsar ruled that all trade dues
demanded of foreigners would be payable in gold or in the Bohemian Joachimstaler/
thaler, a silver coin known as efimok/efimki in Muscovy,’2 whereas his subjects
would only be expected to pay dues in Russian coins. Secondly, he tried to encourage
foreign merchants to bring gold and silver into the country by repealing all dues on
such imports, and also all export dues on the goods purchased with the bullion.
Thirdly, he declared cryptically that all the gold and silver which they might import
should be declared at Customs and handed in to the Treasury in exchange for local
coins. Fourthly, he gave a low value for all foreign gold and silver coins. The gold
coins he equated with the silver rouble which, according to Bazilevich, brought him a
profit of 30%. As for the silver coins, he correctly declared that 14 efimki of Lubeck

weighed 1 Russian lb (409.5 gr), i.e. that 1 efimok weighed 29.2 gr.73 But then he
artificially equated one rouble with two efimki (58.6 gr), although in fact the silver
rouble only weighed between 40.9 and 48 grammes at the time. This low valuation
resulted in an initial profit of the order of 25% which increased when, as intended, the

efimki were melted down and re-issued as Russian coins.’4
Still on the subject of gold and silver coins, the Ustav warned that foreigners who
failed to declare such coins on entering the country would have to pay a 10 per cent
fine. As for Bukharans, Indians, Kizilbash and even Astrakhan Bukharans, they were
strictly forbidden to acquire such coins in Muscovy. If any were found on them they
would be confiscated, the excuse being that they were known to have exported a lot
of efimki from Muscovy in the past.’> The prohibition concerning the acquisition of
70 Krijanich, Russkoe gosudarstvo, 9. Bazilevich, "Novotorgovyi ustav", 589-95. Klyuchevskii,
Kurs, Xl, 281-5, places the ‘copper riots’ in 1663, but this is contradicted by both Spasskii
(Russkaya monetnaya sistema, 114-7) and Riasanovsky (196) who give the year as 1662.

71 P.S.Z., I, 651-63, pass.
72 See Spasskii, Russkaya monetnaya sistema, 107-8 and Klyuchevskii, Skazaniya, 307, on the
thaler.
73 P.S.Z., I, 659, 660, clauses 56, 72, 73. Bazilevich, "Novotorgovyi ustav", 612-3. Spasskii,
Sakharov, 116, explains that in the early seventeenth century 7 ‘old efimok’ equalled 1 grivenka
in weight, i.e. 48 zolotniki (204.48 gr) which means that 1 efimok must have weighed 29.2 gr.
Its weight had gone down by 1698 to 28.4 gr. See the "Rubl'" entry in the Sovetskaya
istoricheskaya entsiklopedia, vol. 12, 239.
74 P.S.Z., I, 660, clause 73. According to Mel'nikova, 199, the rouble weighed 40.9 gr under Tsar
Aleksei. Sovetskaya istoricheskaya entsiklopedia, vol. 12, 239. Here the weight of the rouble
after the Swedish and Polish wars of the seventeenth century is given as 48 gr. Szeftel, 358, says
the profit made was of the order of 30-41%.

75 P.S.Z., I, 660-2, clauses 73, 79.
485

Bukharan trade

silver and gold coins must have been particularly irksome to Bukharans for several
reasons. Firstly, they were keen to take back silver coins to the khanate, for there
were practically no gold coins there and the local silver coins were of poor quality.
Secondly, they were deprived of a useful source of trade, the silver and gold coins
selling advantageously to the nomads whom they visited on their return journey.
Thirdly, they needed such coins for the payment of trade dues in Muscovy. They
were not allowed to acquire them even temporarily for this purpose by selling their
goods to their western counterparts, for the Ustav strictly forbade trade between
foreigners in Muscovy. And if they purchased the necessary coins at an inflated rate
from the Muscovite authorities, they were sure to lose a great part of their profit.”
The Ustav also introduced a new flat rate of transit dues to be paid by all
foreigners if they wished to take their goods to a town not situated on the frontier.
The new rate was 20 den'gi per rouble. It was payable on leaving the frontier town
and also on returning to it, and was identical whether they travelled to Moscow or to
any other town. In the case of eastern merchants it would seem that they were
expected to enter Muscovy solely through Astrakhan, the regulation specifying that
they paid the new rate on leaving Astrakhan and on returning there ‘from Moscow
and other towns’. If this was indeed the case, then the new ruling was very costly for
those wanting to travel to other towns on the Volga. Thus merchants who might have
earlier gone directly to Samara or Kazan' and paid no transit dues at all, now had to
pay 20 den'gi per rouble each way for travelling there from Astrakhan. Those who
previously paid 16 den'gi per rouble for taking their goods from Astrakhan to
Kazan’, transit dues being payable four times en route, now had an additional 4
den'gi to pay. However, those going as far as Moscow would have saved 12 den'gi
per rouble each way, assuming that there were still eight towns on the way, as in
1590, at which transit dues were payable.” If, on the other hand, merchants were
still allowed to travel directly to Samara and Kazan’, and if they elected to conduct the
whole of their trading operations there, then the new rate of proezzhaya poshlina
would have made no difference to them.
Another damaging new clause aimed at foreigners in general demanded that they
should pay transit dues when taking Russian goods abroad, these dues to be
calculated on the basis of the price which they might get at the time of sale. This must
have been a major blow for traders, because it meant that their potential profit was
also subject to Muscovite tax, again at the rate of 20 den'gi per rouble in gold and

silver.78
With reference to the scale of dues to be demanded from foreigners in Muscovy
the Tsar ruled that sales dues would continue to be assessed at 12 den'gi per rouble
throughout Muscovy, as before. He added that the rate in Arkhangel'sk would be 10
den'gi on weighables and 8 den'gi on non-weighables, which was in fact the rate that
had obtained in Arkhangel'sk since 1654, as noted by De Rodes, although it had not
been officially confirmed before. The clauses in question were intended to calm all
fears of the new regulations in the minds of foreign traders, but in accordance with

the new policy the Tsar stressed that payment would be required in gold and silver.
76
77
78
79

Thid.,
Thid.,
Thid.,
Thid.,

659-60, clauses 60, 62, 63.
661, 659, clauses 77, 78, 56.
660, clause 66.
659, 660, 657, clause 59, 64, 40.

486

Trade with Muscovy

Another clause addressed the problem of the sale of Russian goods between
foreigners, which in the future was to be permitted in Arkhangel'sk. This is
particularly interesting because it contradicts three other clauses of the same Ustav

which strictly forbade trading by foreigners among themselves.®° It also proves that,

although the Tsar was determined to favour local Muscovite traders by giving them
the sole right of dealing with foreigners, he was prepared to waive this rule in
Arkhangel'sk, if that helped the sale of Russian goods.
Turning to Tsar Aleksei's own subjects, the Ustav made it clear that they would
continue to pay 10 den’gi on all sales, as established in 1653, except in Arkhangel'sk
where 10 den'gi would be charged on the sale of weighables, but a lower rate of 8
den'gi would apply to the sale of non-weighables.®!
Three clauses dealt specifically with the trading activities of eastern merchants.
They were given preferential treatment in comparison to their western counterparts,
for they were only required to pay 10 den'gi on the sale of their own goods, whether
they traded in Astrakhan or in Moscow. This meant a decrease of 2 den'gi on the rate
which they had paid since 1653, but it was stressed that their payments of transit dues
would be the same as those expected from other foreigners, i.e., 20 den'gi per
rouble. Eastern residents of Astrakhan were also expected to pay the high transit dues
of 20 den'gi per rouble, perhaps because, as mentioned above, they were suspected
of passing off some of the foreign visitors' goods as their own. Such was the Tsar's
suspicion of eastern merchants in general that he thought it necessary to add that the
officials at Astrakhan should carefully check the bales taken out of Moscow by
eastern visitors and residents. If any zapovednye tovary, or items which were not
listed at the time of inspection in the capital were found, he added, then they should

be confiscated ‘pitilessly’ for the Treasury.82
Other discriminatory measures affecting western traders included the requirement
for foreign merchants trading in Arkhangel'sk to pay dues even on those goods which
they had failed to sell, or which remained on their boats (after the annual fair). This
was done in order to protect the Treasury, the stated reason being that a merchant
might sell the items later secretly, and without paying the required tax. However, the
real reason may have been that the Tsar thus obtained even more interest-free bullion
for his major foreign purchases. Tsar Aleksei also restricted the activities of
westerners by insisting that no foreigner was allowed to take his goods to Moscow
from Pskov, Novgorod or Arkhangel'sk unless he obtained a letter with a special seal

informing officials that he had the Tsar's permission to do so.83
The remaining clauses applying to foreigners were just as damaging to Bukharans
as they were to all other foreign traders. The Tsar made it quite clear that foreigners
must on no account sell their goods retail. He also forbade them to trade at fairs in the
future, whether directly or through agents, although it was only at trade fairs that
foreign merchants could deal directly with the producer and avoid the middleman,
thus obtaining the greatest possible choice of local goods-at the most economical
price. And in order to stress that he had every intention of enforcing these rulings, he
added that any items sold retail by a foreigner or sent to a fair with agents would be
80 Thid., Clauses 60, 63 and 83.
81 [hid., clauses 29, 30, 90, 12, 13.

82 Thid., 661, 653, clauses 77, 78, 12.
83 Ibid., 661, 662, clauses 75, 85.

487

Bukharan trade

confiscated. The Novotorgovyi ustav closed with an unpleasant note which showed
the Tsar's distrust of foreigners. Detailed instructions were given for the bales and
boxes of all foreign merchants to be carefully searched at all Muscovite frontier towns
and major fairs in order to prevent them from smuggling out precious stones, valuable

items or forbidden goods.84
The difficulties introduced by the Novotorgovyi Ustav were compounded that
same year, when the Tsar gave an Armenian company the monopoly for importing

Iranian silk into Muscovy. The traders of Bukhara were badly affected, because this
was yet another article which they had been importing and selling profitably for many

years.
As a result of these two initiatives there was a marked decrease in the trading
activities of Bukharans in Muscovy which Tsar Aleksei did his best to reverse during
the following few years. He did so in three ways. Firstly, he sent ambassador
Pazukhin to Bukhara in 1669 with a letter in which he suggested both the renewal of
their mutual diplomatic links and the development*of ‘free’ trade between the two
countries. Secondly, despite the stringent rules introduced in the Novotorgovyi
Ustav, he permitted ambassador Mulla Farrukh to purchase numerous objects made
of silver and to take them back, together with 25 silver coins and over 300 gold coins
(chervontsy), some of which were apparently double ones, which were quite rare.®5
Thirdly he offered to relax the clauses of the Novotorgovyi Ustav for Bukharans
traders and to permit them to trade for money or goods at the frontier. This offer was
first made in a letter of 1671 entrusted to Mulla Farrukh, but the letter did not get to
Bukhara as the hapless ambassador died in Tobol'sk on his way home. It was
repeated, therefore, in a letter sent with Daudov in 1675, and as an additional
incentive the ambassador was told to mention that Bukharan traders would be allowed

to visit Moscow and would be provided with food and transport.86
Meanwhile, despite the initial impact of the Novotorgovyi Ustav and perhaps
because they hoped that its rules might be relaxed in time, Bukharan and other eastern
traders resumed their visits to Astrakhan. By the summer of 1672 they were arriving
in such numbers that the Tsar felt it necessary to order stringent checks on their
goods. His instructions were reproduced in a very lengthy and rambling letter sent in
August by the voevoda of Astrakhan, Yakov Odoevskii, to the Customs officials of
this town. He began by ordering them to supervise the unloading of the busa from
beginning to end. They were told to insist upon goods being transferred to one or two
ambary in the ‘new foreigners' gostinyi dvor’. These ambary should then be sealed
up until such a time as the goods could be inspected and a stamp affixed on them,
except in the case of silk which would presumably suffer as a result. Odoevskii
returned to the matter of the foreigners’ trading hostels later in the letter. It turned out
that the ‘new foreigners' gostinyi dvor’ mentioned earlier had not yet been built, but
he explained that its construction was essential because foreigners had been taking
advantage of the generous accomodation provided for them in the existing Bukharan,
Indian and Gilanian inns. They sub-let part of their quarters to visitors for a
substantial sum of money, but only remitted to the Treasury a paltry 40 den'gi to
cover each visitor's accomodation fee (postoinyi). The sub-tenants had then hidden a

84 Ihid., 662, 663, clauses 83, 94.
85 TsGADA, fond 109, op.1, 1669-1675 kn.1, listy 120b-5a. Spasskii, "Den'gi", 248.
86 Thid., 46a. TsGADA, fond 109, op.1, 1671-1676 kn.4, listy 134b, 147a.
488

Trade with Muscovy

lot of undeclared goods in their rooms, thus depriving the Treasury of the Customs
dues, as well as the warehousing fees which they ought to have paid. Worse still,
many items such as tobacco had been smuggled into the country. In view of this Tsar
Aleksei had decided that a new gostinyi dvor should be erected on the site of the
existing Indian inn. This was to be tightly guarded, and Odoevskii made it clear that
foreign visitors, together with resident Astrakhan Bukharans, Gilanians and Indians
were expected to trade there, and there only, the implication being that they had all

been trading in other places which were unsupervised.87
The authorities were also suspicious of the commercial envoys sent by the rulers
of the khanate and Iran. It was thought that they made a habit of passing off ordinary
traders as members of their suites, thus depriving his Treasury of the transit dues and
other taxes which such merchants should have paid. Odoevskii accordingly instructed
the Customs officials to be on their guard against ‘the Shah's kupchiny’ and to charge
dues even upon their official goods, adding that a double payment should be exacted
on those goods which the Iranian kupchiny might be carrying in addition to those
listed in the Shah's letter. With regard to zapovednye tovary, here listed as gold and
silver, iron and tin, weapons (arrows, arrow tips, harquebusses), nails and axes,
birds of prey, Noghay and Tatar slaves, Tsar Aleksei was just as uncompromising
and as suspicious. Such goods were not to be sold to ordinary Central Asian
merchants (teziki), and none should be taken out of the country by Iranian
ambassadors or kupchiny unless they could show Customs officials a specific
permission bearing his signature. At the same time, however, the officials were
warned against delaying merchants or taking advantage of them in any way.88
Special reference was also made to the illegal import of tobacco and the smuggling
out of other goods. Odoevskii urged the Customs officials to prevent the import of
tobacco into Astrakhan and other parts of Muscovy. He explained that foreigners had
obtained a lot of silver and gold in exchange for it in the past and they had taken this
silver and gold out of the country to their own land ‘making themselves rich’. If any
tobacco was imported, therefore, it should be taken for the Treasury, unless it was
found on the boats which arrived at the town, in which case it should be confiscated
during the merchants’ stay and returned to them when they left. The goods exported
from Astrakhan by Bukharans and others were also to be carefully checked against
the list given to the merchants in their last Muscovite port of call. And if any items
were found over and above those entered, the merchants should be punished and

made to pay three times the usual tolls.89
The new and thorough checks introduced by the Tsar on the goods imported into
Astrakhan were bound to cause delays for Bukharans, but these measures were
perfectly legitimate and may well have been expected by eastern merchants generally,
as they were aimed at stopping tax evasion, as well as the illegal export of monopoly
goods. On the other hand, a new rule was introduced in 1672 which denied them

access either to Moscow or to any towns situated on the Volga, north of Astrakhan,
and this must have come as a total surprise and a great disappointment. This severe
limitation on the freedom of Bukharans and other eastern visitors was extended also
to all the eastern residents of Astrakhan, whether Armenians,

87 Russko-indiiskie otnosheniya,

175-7.

88 Thid., 178-9.
89 Ipid., 176.
489

Bukharans, teziki,

Bukharan trade

Indians or Gilanians, the only exception being the Shah's ambassadors and
kupchiny.% Thus, only five years after the Novotorgovyi Ustav and the treaty with
the Armenian silk company, trade in the capital was forbidden, and the minor
advantages which Bukharans and others may have derived from the new transit and
sales dues introduced in 1667 were at an end. No reasons were given for Tsar
Aleksei's sudden decision, but it was probably connected with the invasion of the
Ukraine by the Ottomans and the khan of Crimea in 1672. The Tsar could not take the
risk of allowing Muslim, or even Armenian merchants, to travel freely up to Moscow,
for they might be spies who could pass on valuable information about his military
plans. However, the new rule was circumvented that very year, for a total of seven
eastern merchants,

including Iranians,

Indians

and one

Bukharan,

travelled

Moscow in November 1672 as members of the Iranian ambassador's suite.?!
In the meantime, although Yakov Odoevskii had told the local Customs officials

that a new gostinyi dvor was being planned for Astrakhan, he had taken no steps
towards having it built. In April 1673, eight months after Odoevskii's letter, Tsar
Aleksei therefore renewed his earlier instructions, naming Gilanian, Bukharan and
Indian visitors, together with local teziki, Bukharans and Indians, as the traders for
whom the new inn was intended. And this time his instructions were heeded, for

work on the new inn started soon afterwards and was completed before Odoevskii's
term of office came to an end in April 1674.92 In another letter to Odoevskii, this time
written in September 1673, Tsar Aleksei carefully itemised the types of goods which
neither Muscovites nor foreigners were permitted to export. Two new items were
added to his previous list. One was young Tatars, which seems to indicate that the
previous year's ruling about Tatar slaves had been circumvented by slave-traders,
possibly with the connivance of lax officials. Another item was, surprisingly, live
sables. It may be that since 1664, when the purchase and export from Siberia of
expensive pelts was strongly condemned, merchants had found that they could still
buy top quality sables, provided that they were alive, and then take them out of the

country via Muscovy. 93
This further limitation on the goods available to merchants cannot have pleased
Bukharans, although there is no reason to believe that they did not manage to smuggle
sables and other zapovednye tovary out of the country, if Kilburger is right in
claiming that they were still smuggling rhubarb into Siberia and from there into
Moscow in 1673, more than 15 years after its import, purchase, transport and sale
had been strictly forbidden in both Muscovy and Siberia.2* Meanwhile the regulation
limiting access to Moscow continued in force, a party of three Indians having to
okies permission in May 1674 before they could go to the capital to recover
ebts.
In 1678 a new item, viz. grain, was included in the list of zapovednye tovary
given to the captain of the busa in Astrakhan, but Bukharans were not discouraged by

90 Thid., 177.
91 Pares, 209. Russko-indiiskie otnosheniya, 181.
92 D.A.I., VI, 272. Russko-indiiskie otnosheniya, 323.

93 D.A.L., VI, 312. See Ibid., IV, 355, 361, about the prohibition of the export of sables in 1664
and see chapter 15 below, pass., for other regulations applying to sables.

94 Kurts, "Sochinenie", 106. P.S.Z., I, 426-7.
95 Russko-indiiskie otnosheniya, 323.

490

Trade with Muscovy
this new reduction in the range of goods available for export. They continued to trade
in Muscovy and apparently imported rhubarb illegally in such quantities that Aleksei's
son and successor, Fedor II, decided to lift the ban on its import. In October 1680 he
instructed the voevoda of Verkhotur'e to allow through to Moscow the rhubarb which
was known to be coming ‘from Bukhara and other places’, the only provisoes being
that he must note down the merchants’ names and the quantities of rhubarb carried,
and that no rhubarb must be sold en route. This concession, however, did not stop
smugglers. They were’still taking rhubarb illegally into Moscow in April 1681, the
prices fetched on the black market obviously being more satisfactory than those paid

by the authorities.%
Bukharans and eastern merchants were not the only ones who ignored the Tsar's
rulings. In 1679 Tsar Fedor had to give instructions for unauthorized traders to be
removed from Red Square. He also had to remind his officials that the foreign
merchants who were in the capital were only permitted to trade wholesale and only
within the confines of the gostinyi dvor.%7
Meanwhile the new foreigners’ gostinyi dvor of Astrakhan, which was built out
of stone by Yakov Odoevskii in 1673-4,98 does not seem to have been fully
operational eight years later. In his instructions to one of Odoevskii's successors, the
voevoda Golovin, on 11 March 1681 Fedor II therefore felt it necessary to recall in
detail the reasons which had led to the building of this inn on the location of the
former Indian inn. Once again, and using virtually identical terms to those adopted by
Odoevskii and by Tsar Aleksei in 1672 and 1673, the Tsar stressed that Gilanian,
Bukharan and Indian visitors, together with their local counterparts, should be
ordered to place their goods in individual shops in the inn and nowhere else. The inn
was to be guarded, so that nothing could be taken in or out without being checked and
cleared by Customs. A properly completed Customs form, Tsar Fedor added, should
be handed in before any article could be removed and, in order to prevent problems
and to help officials secure the correct payment of tolls and transaction dues, he
decreed the formation of a no-man's-land around the inn. This was to be an area of
some 20 metres in radius, on which no building of any type would be allowed.
None of these measures was likely to discourage law-abiding Bukharans and
other eastern traders from trading in Astrakhan, but an additional measure introduced
at the same time, and modified in early March, was more disquieting. Although
Bukharans and teziki would still be allowed to come over and trade, none would be
allowed to settle in Astrakhan in the future. This measure did not extend to Indians,
Georgians or Armenians, probably because Bukharans and Gilanians were especially

96 D.A.1., VII, 74. A.1., V, 91, 100-1.
77 P.§ Z., I, 215.
98 Russko-indiiskie otnosheniya, 323. Materialy, 253.
99 Teziki, in this context, appears to have meant Gilanians rather than Iranians, or even
Khwarazmians, none of whom were ever specifically mentioned as residents of Astrakhan.

100 Yaterialy, 253. The number of Georgians, Armenians and even Indians living, or intending to
live in Astrakhan, was probably considerably smaller than the number of Bukharans and
Gilanians living there at the time. Golikova (163, 170) says there were about 100 Indian

residents in the 1670s, 73 Gilanians in 1694 and 146 Bukharans in the early eighteenth century.
Gilanian numbers went up to 178 by 1744-6, as against 469 Bukharans. Numbers of Indian
residents, on the other hand, slowly declined to 89 by 1784. (Yukht, 54.)

49]

Bukharan trade

signed with the Sultan at Bakchisarai in 1681 Fedor II still regarded the Ottomans
with the greatest suspicion, and his suspicions would prove to be well-founded when
they attacked Austria in 1682 and even marched on Vienna in 1683.10!
Notwithstanding the new restriction on immigration, and although foreign
merchants kept on smuggling in rhubarb, the Muscovite authorities were keen to
encourage eastern visitors to trade in Astrakhan. That was why, when the Customs
official on duty at the Yaik was instructed to examine and tax the goods imported by
Muscovites and foreign merchants in 1684, he was emphatically told to exempt the
Qalmagq, Bukharans, Khivans and Turkmen from both the examination and the

requisite Customs dues. !02
Eastern merchants accordingly continued to visit Astrakhan and even went further
afield. In 1684 the Regent Sophia received a long memorandum from Indian residents
of Astrakhan who complained that whereas they were debarred from travelling to
Moscow, Bukharans, Armenians, Greeks and others ‘were trading freely’ in the
capital.!03 It is not known how these merchants had managed to circumvent the
decree of 1672 banning even eastern residents of Astrakhan from visiting Moscow,

but the Indians' appeal against discrimination failed miserably. They did not convince
the Regent that the Treasury would benefit greatly if they were permitted to trade in
Moscow. On the-contrary, as a result of their complaint a thorough investigation was
ordered into the behaviour of foreign traders in Astrakhan and new limitations were
eventually imposed upon them all.
The investigation into the situation in Astrakhan was conducted by the Kazan'
department in charge of foreigners, who found that the gostinyi dvor of 1674 was
inadequate for the accommodation of all eastern traders. This was reported to the
Regent and she accordingly issued orders in February 1685 for the building of three
new gostinye dvory, one of which, the Bukharan inn, was to be situated outside the
town. The Indian and Gilan inns, on the other hand, could be erected ‘in the wooden

town’, as long as the site chosen was ‘far from the Churches’. This rather strange
ruling probably reflected the general fear of, and hostility towards Muslims which
developed in Europe in the aftermath of the siege of Vienna, as well as the belief that
they might cause some sort of trouble if allowed to live near consecrated buildings.
However, there was a danger that the Regent's decision to provide better
accommodation for eastern merchants might be miscontrued and taken as actively
encouraging them to settle in Astrakhan. She therefore made it clear in the same letter
that although existing Bukharan and Gilanian residents would be allowed to remain in
Astrakhan if they swore the oath of fealty, no new immigrants, whether Indian,
Bukharan or ‘teziki’, would be permitted to settle there in the future. And no
difficulties whatsoever would be put in the way of those who might decide to

leave.!04 The letter ended with a reference to the permission given in 1674 for a
number of Indian merchants to visit Moscow, and it was stressed that this was only
an exception to the ruling (of 1672), and that foreigners still needed a special permit in
order to travel to the capital.
The Regent was also very impressed by the petitions of Muscovite merchants
101 pares, 209. Dukes, 39.
102 Materialy, 254.

103 Russko-indiiskie otnosheniya, 314, 318.

104 Thid, 323.
492

Trade with Muscovy

from six towns situated on the Volga, which were directed against their foreign
competitors in general, and more especially against Indian merchants. Not only did
‘foreigners of all countries’ pay far too little in trade taxes, they said, they also
engaged in retail trade in the frontier towns (although this was strictly forbidden).
Indian merchants were said to be particularly unprincipled, for they passed
themselves off as Iranian commercial envoys in order to be allowed to live for several
years in Moscow and Astrakhan. They also took goods from Moscow to Astrakhan,
where they sold them to other foreigners in complete disregard of the provisions of
the Novotorgovyi Ustav. Worse still, they defrauded the Treasury (of declarations
fees) by selling as their own the goods belonging to foreign visitors, and they
absolutely refused to trade with their Muscovite opposite numbers in Astrakhan,
because they were intent on taking their goods to sell in the capital.
Once the allegations had been investigated instructions were sent to the voevody
of the six towns in May 1685 to make it clear that all Indians, Bukharans, Gilanians
and teziki, whether visitors or Astrakhan residents, were strictly forbidden to travel to
Moscow or even up the Volga. As for the Indian traders, they were, not surprisingly,
singled out and ordered to trade only with Muscovites in Astrakhan. 195
Two years later the list of items classed as zapovednye was slightly reduced. In
May 1687 the Regent decreed that the export of iron, tin and copper from Astrakhan
should be permitted, provided that they were taken out as bars or sheets of metal, and
not made up into weapons, axes, arrowheads, nails or any other military supplies, the
export of which was still strictly forbidden, as was the export of Noghay and Tatar
slaves and birds of prey. This ruling took some time to get through to Astrakhan, for
in the instructions given that same month to the captain of the busa as he was leaving
for Karagan, tin and copper were still listed as zapovednye, together with gold and
silver coins, rifles and corn. The captain was told to check all those who went aboard,

together with their goods and transit passes. He was instructed not to take to Karagan
any who produced passes in which their goods were not clearly listed. And as for
those merchants who might be carrying zapovednye tovary, he was to have them
removed from the boat and referred to the voevoda.10
Meanwhile Muscovite-Ottoman hostilities had been resumed, following a peace
treaty between the Regent Sophia and the king of Poland, Jan Sobieski, in 1686, and
the formation of a Grand European Alliance against Turkey. Poland having renounced
its claims on Kiev and the left bank of the Dniepr on condition that Muscovy make
war on the Sultan and on the khan of Crimea, the Regent Sophia's paramour, Prince
Golitsyn, marched to Crimea in 1687 with a large army. Unfortunately, due to the
slowness

of the march, the heat and the bad organisation of the campaign,

his

expedition was a dismal failure and no fewer than 45,000 men were lost without even
making contact with the enemy. The following year the Crimean army advanced as far
as Kiev, taking 60,000 Muscovite prisoners. And shortly afterwards two members of
the Grand Alliance, Poland and Austria began separate talks with the Sultan. Fearful
that she might be left alone in the fight against Turkey, the Regent protested to her
allies and announced that Golitsyn would undertake a second campaign against
Crimea.!°7 When he set off via Samara in February 1689 it was thought essential, for

105 Tpid. , 331-9.
106 p.§.Z., Ill, 313-4. A.l., V, 265.
107 Tstoriya diplomatii, 230. Grey, 50, 56, 59. Istoriya SSSR, ch.I, 78. Riasanovsky, 236.

493

Bukharan trade

security reasons, to reiterate and even tighten the prohibition regarding access to
Moscow, as eastern merchants were bound to find out, either on their way to the
capital or during their stay, something about the movements of his troops, which
information might well be relayed to the Crimeans. The loyalty of the eastern
inhabitants of Astrakhan in particular was still suspect, and it would appear that many
had contrived to secure the necessary permits for trading in Moscow, for the Regent
thought it necessary to issue strict orders for their expulsion from the capital in March

1689.
Only the agents of the Armenian company would be permitted to remain in
Moscow, the Astrakhan voevoda was told. All the ‘Indians, Bukharans, Gilanians
and teziki who called themselves Astrakhan inhabitants’ would be sent back. And in
future, whether they carried goods or not, and even if they were merely trying to
collect debts, they and their foreign brethren would be forbidden to travel to Moscow,
or to the towns situated on the Volga, or to any of the various fairs.!°8 Having thus
restricted the activities of Bukharan and other eastern merchants to Astrakhan, the
Regent then ruled that ‘visiting foreigners’ would no longer be permitted to spend the
winter in Astrakhan. There could have been an element of xenophobia in this ruling,
although the Regent would also have been concerned with saving money, not only in
fees to the Customs officials who supervised the foreigners' activities, but also on the
subsidies which might have still been granted to the.merchants as they were to
Khwajah Ibrahim prior to 1640. Her decision, however, was serious, for it forced
Central Asians to expedite their business deals, and this was alien to them. They
generally took a very long time to pay for goods purchased and they preferred to wait
before selling in order to obtain the best possible price for their goods.!
After 1689 the prohibition of trade outside Astrakhan remained in force, although
Peter the Great relaxed it in the case of eastern merchants settled in Astrakhan. In the
comprehensive

set of instructions which he gave the new

voevoda

of Terki,

Volkonskii,!!° on his appointment in May 1697, he decreed that the ‘teziki, Indians,
Bukharans, Gilanians and Armenians of Astrakhan’, should be permitted to trade in
Moscow and the Volga towns. Foreign visitors, on the other hand, ought to remain
excluded from the capital, an exception being made only for the Shah's ambassadors,
envoys and commercial agents. Rather surprisingly Bukharan envoys and kupchiny
did not benefit from a similar exemption, although Peter the Great and his brother had
promised in 1695 that if their envoy, Semen Malen'kii, was given accomodation,

freedom to trade and full permission to travel in the khanate, Bukharan merchants
would be treated with ‘similar graciousness’ in Muscovy.!!! Perhaps this was
because no envoy from the khanate was expected to visit Muscovy. Despite the letters
to Moscow and Siberia which Subhan Quli sent with Chichkanov in February 1696,

108 Teziki in this case probably meant Khwarazmians, as well as people from Shamakha and Iran.
109 Russko-indiiskie otnosheniya, 347-8. See Materialy, 150, for the large subsidy allegedly
received by Khwajah Ibrahim. Popov, ‘Snosheniya’, 302. Meyendorff (247) found that Bukharan
merchants fixed no date for the return of their agents from Russia in the early nineteenth

century, because they preferred them to wait until they could sell their goods at the highest
possible price.

110 p.§.Z., IM, 307-22.
111 Thid., 316. Materialy, 260-2. Malinovskii, 161-5. Semen Malen'kii seems to have completed

his journey to India via Khiva and Bukhara, and he returned to Russia via Surat and Bandar

Abbas in 1701.

494

Trade with Muscovy

none had in fact come over since the visit of the chihra aqasi ‘Ali in 1677, who had
not endeared himself to the authorities by claiming, falsely, that he had been robbed
on the Yaik.112
Peter the Great went on to remind the voevoda that the papers and goods of all
foreigners had to be checked carefully so that none of them could avoid paying the
relevant dues and taxes. Quite apart from checks on arrival and departure, the
merchants should be kept under observation throughout their stay to ensure that they
did not have an opportunity to survey the town and its fortifications. The voevoda
was also to make sure that no money was paid to foreign merchants at any time, as in
their case barter alone was permitted. These measures did not mean that the legitimate
activities of eastern traders were to be discouraged.!!3 On the contrary, the Tsar even
granted them two small concessions to show his goodwill. Tobacco imports into
Astrakhan would no longer be seized: they would be confiscated during a merchant's
Stay, to be returned at the time of departure, except in the case of second offenders
when restitution would be impossible. Individual merchants would also be permitted
to bring into the town a little over 8 kg for their personal use. By these concessions
the Tsar hoped to secure the co-operation of merchants and to put an end, both to the
illegal import of tobacco and to the export of silver, large quantities of which were
said to have left the country in the past as a result of tobacco sales.
Turning next to the export of zapovednye tovary from Astrakhan, he reinforced
existing prohibitions by decreeing that in future neither ambassadors nor envoys
should be allowed to purchase such goods. The voevoda was ordered to disregard his
own previous rulings if necessary and to be adamant, even if exact quantities of
permissible purchases were listed on (what appeared to be) official documents, which
seems to suggest that Bukharan and other eastern envoys were known to have forged
letters in the past in order to take prohibited goods out of the country.
The list of forbidden goods appended was somewhat different from earlier lists.
Bullion, birds of prey, corn, guns and arrowheads were still included, as were Tatar

slaves, but Noghay slaves, tin and copper were omitted altogether. On the other hand,
the earlier and rather general prohibition concerning iron was re-introduced, as was
the ban on suits of armour. Helmets, sulphur, gunpower and lead were added to the
list, which is hardly surprising in view of their military connotation, but the inclusion
of fortified wine and Muscovite slaves is less easy to explain. It may be that the
revenue derived from the wine tax had noticeably decreased as a result of exports. As
to the new category of slaves, either Peter the Great had reason to believe that a large
number of Muscovites had been smuggled out of the country as slaves, or else he just
wanted to prevent possible losses in manpower at a time when he was planning to
lead a major European campaign against the Ottomans. Although he gave no details of
the manner in which the Muscovite slaves might have been smuggled out or acquired
in the first place, it is known that Muscovites who owed money to eastern and other

merchants sometimes became their bonded serfs (kabal'nyi kholop), a common
enough state of affairs for insolvent debtors at the time. If that was the case, then the
eastern merchants could easily have seized them bodily and concealed them among the
slaves whose export was permitted, in order to sell them off in the slave marts of

112 p.A.1., X, 384. Materialy, 236, 231n.
113 ps. Z,, Ill, 315-6, 318, 313.

495

Bukharan trade

Bukhara, Khiva and Iran.114
Peter the Great concluded his instructions to the voevoda of Terki by recalling the

history of the latest inn for foreign traders to be built in Astrakhan and, using
practically the same wording as the Regent Sophia in 1685, he ordered him to build
the three traders’ inns which had been planned in that year.!!5 With regard to the

eastern residents of Astrakhan, he was prepared, like the Regent, to let them remain in

the town provided that they swore an oath of fealty, and he stressed, like her, that he

wanted no new ones to settle, but he was probably less hostile towards them than his

predecessor, for he didn't stress that they should be allowed to leave the town if they
wanted to do so.
In the years between 1697 and 1702 there was little change in official Muscovite
policy towards the activities of foreign traders. In 1699 Peter the Great made it clear
to the various town governors of his realm that all foreigners must be encouraged to
come over and that they must not be caused either losses or delays. In June 1700 he
instructed the Astrakhan voevoda to be kind to Bukharan and other eastern traders, to

pay fair prices for their goods and to tell them to come over and trade. The voevoda
was also to warn them that they would lose this right if they tried to smuggle in
foreigners or if they failed to bring the required.proezzhaya gramota stating their town

of origin and the number of men in their party.!16
Trade dues continued to be charged in silver and gold. In a letter which he sent to
Astrakhan in April 1700, the ruler of Khiva, Shah Niyaz, complained about the
excessively high valuation of the goods taken to Astrakhan by Bukharan and Khivan
merchants. He added that the dues demanded from them were crippling because they

were payable in money, and he put in a plea for them to be taken in kind.!!7
So much for Bukharans trading in Muscovy. But what about Muscovites trading
in the khanate? Far less is known about their activities, although some information
can be gleaned from the lists of goods which they took to Karagan, and those which
were stolen from them in Khiva when they were on their way to Bukhara. Before
studying these lists, however, something should be said about these traders, their
problems and their status within Muscovy itself.
People of all callings tended to engage in trade in Muscovy, but there was also an
official traders' class, which ranged from the posadskie lyudi at the bottom, to the
gosti at the top. The posadskie lyudi were all members of a posad, a self-ruling urban
community which elected its own elders, policed itself and paid taxes collectively to
the Treasury. All posadskie lyudi, whether craftsmen, traders, priests or others, had
to pay their share of the heavy communal burden of taxes known as tyaglo. The
tyaglo was assessed by the state on the number of houses in the community, and on
the expected scale of its trading activities. It was apportioned by their elected officials
according to the relative wealth of the members of the posad. It included certain
obligations or corvées, such as providing the grain allowance which the authorities
gave to soldiers as part of their wages, and building or repairing the fortifications of
their town. Another obligation was the provision of horses for the vital government
postal relay service or yam. No one who had failed to pay his share of the tyaglo or to

114
115
116
117

p.§.Z,, III, 316, 313-4. Baikova, Rol’, 121-4,
p.s.Z,, Il, 317.
p.s.Z,, III, 648; IV, 33.
TsGADA, fond 134, 1699-1701 no.1, list 78.

496

Trade with Muscovy
perform his obligatory duty of service (sluzhba) to the Tsar was allowed to trade or to
live in the posad. As part of their sluzhba posadskie lyudi were required to collect
taxes, to clean and police the streets, to act as firemen, to serve on Customs posts and
to supply both Muscovite officials and foreign ambassadors with accommodation,

food and transport.118
Another major tax required from the posadskie lyudi was the obrok. This tax was
paid both in kind and in money on the value of an individual's immoveable property,
on the size and value-of his stock, on his profit from trade or any-other occupation
and on the return expected from his hay fields, but not on his crops, which were

assessed separately for the tithe (vydel’nyi khleb).!19 There were also urban taxes or
podat' to pay, and all the taxes connected with trade, including the transit dues
(proezzhaya poshlina) until they were finally abolished for the Tsar's subjects in
1653. The trade taxes to which the posadskie lyudi were liable were generally
assessed at a lower rate than was asked of foreigners. Thus warehousing dues and
declaration fees were between 4 and 6 times lower for a posadskii chelovek trading
in his own town than for a foreigner, and there was a sizeable, although smaller
difference between the rates charged to ‘out-of-towners’ and those charged to
foreigners. As mentioned earlier, transit dues were at half the rate expected from
Bukharans until the Tamozhennyi Ustav was issued, and the sales tax was far lower
before 1653. After that date Bukharans paid the same amount on their sales, i.e., 10
den'gi per rouble, and western merchants paid 12 den’gi, but they all had to pay the
tax in silver and gold, whereas the posadskie lyudi were charged 10 den'gi in Russian

coins. 120
The taxes and corvées required from them were so heavy that during the Time of
Troubles many posadskie lyudi tried to avoid them by leaving the posad to become
peasants or even bonded slaves. This suited neither the state nor the posad, for
despite its depleted numbers it still had to pay the same amount of tyaglo. In view of
the resulting difficulties Tsar Aleksei therefore introduced strict regulations in 1649
which prohibited the posadskie lyudi from either selling their houses and businesses
or changing their status. Thus it was decreed that none but the third son of a posadskii
chelovek could elect to leave his father's class and transfer to the ranks of the
sluzhilye lyudi, the ‘serving-men’ or government officials who benefited from many
privileges.
The posadskie lyudi had other difficulties to contend with apart from taxes. They
were forbidden to keep alcoholic drinks in their houses, and when occasionally
allowed to keep them in small quantities, they had to pay tax and also give an
118 Kostomarov,

146-52. Semenov, Izuchenie, 2, 4. Pipes, 98-100, 201-7. Hittle, 2. Sovetskaya

istoricheskaya entsiklopediya. Kotoshikhin, 152-3.

119 Khilkov, 280. A bird-catcher's obrok consisted in supplying a stipulated number of birds to the
Tsar. P.S.Z., Ul, 446. TsGADA,

fond 214, op.1, kn. 81, listy 35-37, 49. See Sovetskaya

istoricheskaya entsiklopedia for the history of obrok.
120 yaterialy, 106. Pamyatniki, XXII, 713-4. In 1618 Muscovites paid 6 den'gi per rouble to
trade in Astrakhan, and Bukharans paid 14. Akty sobrannye v bibliotekakh, Ul, 144-5. In 1606
the tamga was paid at 1.5 den'ga per rouble by local merchants, 4 den'gi by ‘out-of-towners’ and
7 den'gi by foreigners. According to Osokin (54, 104) the comparative rates of yavka for
Muscovites and foreigners were 1 and 6 den'gi in 1562, 4 and 12 den’gi in 1586. And before

1653 the tamga could vary between 0.5 den'ga and 2 den'gi per rouble for a local merchant, 3 to

4 and only rarely 7 den'gi for an ‘out-of-towner’, and between 7 and 10 den'gi for a foreigner.

497

Bukharan trade

undertaking that they would not try and sell them. They suffered much from the
arbitrary behaviour and extortions of officials and voevody, who not only competed
with them, but sometimes put them into prison and seized their goods in order to
extract bribes from them. There was little the posadskie lyudi could do to obtain
redress because they were completely subject to the jurisdiction of the voevody and
could not appeal against their decisions. Their condition ought to have improved after
1667 when Tsar Aleksei declared that the voevody were forbidden to interfere with
their trading operations and freedom of travel, and that all their complaints and
denunciations would be dealt with in future by one of the Moscow ministries whose
specific function was to defend traders against the voevody. However, they were
now required to travel to the capital for their lawsuits, which was expensive in time
and money, so that the net result of the new regulation was only a marginal
improvement in their lot.
The posadskie lyudi also faced much competition from several quarters. Firstly,
as mentioned earlier, the Tsars removed the most valuable and ‘best-selling’ goods
from the market, declaring them zapovednye or else taking them for their own use.
Secondly, people belonging to other social classes, who paid far fewer taxes than the
posadskie lyudi, were allowed to deal in the same goods as they did. Thus peasants,
who did not pay tyaglo or urban taxes, could séll goods in Moscow and other towns
directly from a cart or boat, which meant that they were charged neither ambarnoe nor
gostinoe, and if they only sold small quantities of goods they paid no tax at all on the

sale.!2! Soldiers who engaged in trade paid neither tyaglo nor podat', and those
living in settlements belonging to the Tsars were also exempt from such payments.
Finally the sluzhilye lyudi, who were engaged on government service full-time, were

also allowed to trade and they were liable neither to tyaglo nor to the corvées.122
The higher classes of traders had several advantages over the posadskie lyudi.
Members of the sukonnaya sotnya were allowed to keep drinks and large quantities
of food in their houses without paying dues. They were exempt from billeting and
from the need to provide carts for officials. They were practically exempt from
corvées, except for bridge building, and they were only liable to trial by a voevoda in
the case of such crimes as robbery and murder. They were permitted to keep alcoholic
drinks in their houses. They did not pay tolls on ferries or bridges, and although
liable to obrok like the posadskie lyudi, unlike them they were permitted to heat their
bath-houses and to keep a fire burning in their izbas ‘at all times’, despite the fire risk
accruing from such a practice. Members of the gostinnaya sotnya and gosti benefited
from additional privileges. They were entirely exempt from corvées, tyaglo, podat'
and several other travelling and transport dues. They were also independent of the
voevoda's jurisdiction and were considered so trustworthy that it was sufficient for
them to send their sworn evidence to Court with a clerk.
The gosti were particularly privileged. A small group of merchants, whose yearly
turnover ranged between 20,000 and 100,000 roubles, their strictly limited numbers
rose from 13 in 1649 to 30 in the 1660s, by which time the gostinnaya sotnya and the
sukonnaya sotnya numbered 200 each. The title of gost' was given as a reward for
loyal service to the Tsar and seems to have been hereditary. In addition to trading on a
large scale for themselves, the gosti acted as the Tsar's commercial agents and

121 Akty sobrannye v bibliotekakh, Il, 145, 409.
122 Pipes, 201-2. Kostomarov, 151-3. Semenov, Izuchenie, 4-5,

498

Trade with Muscovy
advisers. They were far more independent than other traders. According to
Kostomarov, they alone were allowed to ‘travel abroad freely’, which can only mean
that others required special permission, possibly for each trip. The captain of the
government busa, for example, was not permitted to go and trade in Bukhara. When
Ivan Sorokin did so in 1643 he was whipped by way of punishment, his case being
recalled in 1661 as an example of the sort of monstrous departure from the norm

which must never be repeated.!23

When abroad the gosti could trade in all manner of goods, except for the
zapovednye. Within Muscovy they were permitted to acquire an estate which they
could pass on to their descendants. They were eligible for positions of great
importance such as that of dumnoi dyak (Clerk of the Council); they supervised
harbours, fisheries, salt works, the government drinks industry, the mint and the
trade in sables. They dealt with foreign merchants on behalf of the Tsar, acting as
Customs chiefs at Arkhangel'sk and Makar'ev fair, and they fixed the official price
for imported goods.!24 However, like all other traders the gosti suffered from the
Tsar's twin practices of securing the pick of foreign goods for himself and removing
many valuable or popular items from the open market. And they did not always
welcome their promotion to the ranks of the gosti, for this generally meant that they
had to live in Moscow, which was expensive, and that the greater part of their time
would have to be devoted to the Tsar's commercial interests instead of their own. !25
Those Muscovites who were interested in trading with the khanate usually
preferred to cross the Caspian from Astrakhan, either on the busa or on small boats of
their own. Several harbours were visited across the Caspian, among which Kabakly
and Karagan seem to have been preferred by officials, although individual traders
might use other harbours, such as the Sedeev and Nazarovskii harbours mentioned in
the Customs records for 1687 and 1688.126 Others were prepared to travel overland,
provided that they could join the retinue of an ambassador in order to benefit from the

protection of his escort.!27
People from all over Muscovy took part in this trade, there being men from
Astrakhan, Kazan', Nizhnii Novgorod, Ufa and Yaroslavl’ in the party of 14 which
set sail from Astrakhan in 1646. On this occasion the majority were posadskie lyudi,
but two men were clerks, acting on behalf of higher-ranking merchants, one of
whom, Gavrilo Antipin, belonged to the gostinnaya sotnya. The other was the gost'
Grigorii Nikitnikov of Yaroslavl’, a very influential man who had helped the
Romanov dynasty to the throne and who had been interested in the Bukharan trade for
some years, having sold Bukharan hides in Arkhangel'sk in 1630. The members of
this particular expedition traded for themselves and also on behalf of others who had
given them money and goods to take to Khiva and Bukhara. However, it is

123 Akty sobrannye v bibliotekakh, IV, 354-5. Kostomarov, 139-40. Semenov, Izuchenie, 2-4.
Kotoshikhin, 152. Bushkovitch,

124 Kostomarov,

13-4, 21. A.I., V, 67. TSGADA, fond 109, op.1, 1643 no.1.
152. Bushkovitch, 15.

141-4. Semenov, Izuchenie, 3. Kotoshikhin,

125 Kostomarov, 143-4. Pipes, 197, says that they were dragooned into being gosti, and were not
free entrepreneurs, but rather royal factors, appointed by the Tsar and working for him.

126 See TsGADA, fond 134, op.1, 1641 no.2, list 171; Khilkov, 419; Materialy, 140, 203, 327,

364-73 about the various harbours visited. The location of Sedeev and Nazarovskii harbours has

not been established.
127 "Nakaz", 75, 80. This was certainly the case for the Astrakhan traders who went over with

Pazukhin.

499

Bukharan trade

interesting to note that some of these ‘sleeping partners’ were men of very modest
means, who in fact worked as servants at the Troitsk monastery near Nizhnii

128
Novgorod.
This is not the only time that gosti are known to have taken part in the Bukharan
trade. The Stroganov brothers, who colonised Siberia for Ivan the Terrible, sent four
men to the khanate in 1574, and in 1691 Astrakhan gost' Sergei Laboznoi despatched

a clerk to Bukhara who was stopped and deprived of his goods in Khiva.!?°
Other classes involved in this trade between 1678 and 1688 included Cossacks,
musketeers and members of the army described as ‘gunners’, or even as
‘gatekeepers’ of Astrakhan. Vineyard workers, men involved in the fish industry,
official scribes, stonemasons, the Moscow patriarch, a Tatar Prince and a man from
Yaitsk were also listed in the Customs records available. These men either sent
representatives to Karagan or went there themselves. It is not known how many of
them ventured as far as Bukhara in that period, but the yearly numbers involved,
between 24 and 43, were similar to those mentioned by the Khivan ambassador,
Amin Bahadur, in 1643. He said that 40 to 50 merchants went to Khiva every year
and many of them went on to Bukhara and Balkh, where they spent 2 to 3 years
selling their wares. And indeed it could have taken them as long as that to clinch a sale
if a merchant was entitled to change his mind about a purchase three years after
having acquired the goods on credit, as was the case in Bukhara in the early

eighteenth century.!3°
The items intended for Bukhara in 1646 consisted of English and other cloth, two
types of red hide at 2 roubles apiece, fish glue worth 2.50 roubles for 16.38 kg,
sables and also large quantities of wooden dishes. Individual consignments varied
greatly in size and value, ranging between 21 and 1,270 roubles. Similarly cloth,
hides, furs and wooden dishes, figured prominently among the goods taken from
Astrakhan to Karagan, and possibly on to the khanate, in the years 1678 to 1688. The
Muscovites in question also carried otter pelts, walrus tusks, mirrors, castoreum and
wooden boxes, all of which were in great demand in Bukhara. The same merchants
also carried silk, earrings, flour and large quantities of smaller items such as needles,
thimbles, buttons and pins, some of which may have been destined for the Turkmen,
Qalmaq and Khwarazmians who came to trade with Muscovite merchants at Karagan.
However, Mulla Farrukh is known to have taken back 1,400 pins and 558 buttons for
“Abd al-‘Aziz, and since about half the pins were plain, as against those which were
made of gold or silver and decorated with diamonds, it seems likely that they were in

short supply in the khanate and that a ready market was available there.!3!
The list of goods taken to the khanate in 1691 was shorter and consisted of walrus
tusks, hare and otter pelts, castoreum and hides. Surprisingly enough, despite the
numerous prohibitions relating to the export of gold coins from Muscovy, Sergei
Laboznoi had also sent 200 gold coins with his clerk, and he did not hesitate to list
them among the goods which were stolen from the clerk in Khiva. Could it be that

128 See Materialy, 203, 326-31 and A.I., IV, 49-50 about the journey of 1646. See Bushkovitch,
20, 68, about Nikitnikov.
129 Vvedenskii, Torgovyi dom, 94-5. Materialy, 259.
130 Materialy, 364-75, 177. Popov, "Snosheniya", 302.

131 Materialy, 203, 364-75. A.1., IV, 49-50. TSGADA, fond 109, op.1, 1665-75 kn.1, listy 120b2b. Mulla Farrukh also took back several mirrors.

500

Trade with Muscovy

Laboznoi, as a gost’, was exempt from the general prohibition concerning the export
of gold, emphatically repeated as recently as 1673, 1678 and 1687, and that he
therefore had no need to fear that his deposition would attract the Tsar's

displeasure?!32
Far less is known about the goods which Muscovites took back from Bukhara,
although it would seem that zenden' was a firm favourite in the earlier part of the
seventeenth century. Thus in 1622 the merchants travelling with Khokhlov took back
several bales of zenden', of which over 1,000 pieces were seized by the
Khwarazmian authorities, and in 1654 Abt ’1-Ghazi was asked to pay compensation
in Bukharan zenden' for the goods stolen from the Muscovite party in 1646. Other
items acquired in the khanate probably included dorogi, silk sashes, kindyak, bows,
mitkal' and muslin, as bought by Khokhlov, as well as damask, satin, rubies, Indian
goods, silver and gold, all of which Hajji Farrukh suggested as suitable for the

merchants of Muscovy to purchase there in exchange for cloth and hides. !33

132 Yaterialy, 259. D.A.1., VI, 312; VI, 74. A.L, V, 265.
133 Khilkov, 412, 417, 414. Materialy, 207. TSGADA, fond 109, op.1, 1669-75 kn.1, list 111b.

501

15
Trade with Siberia

There was a long-standing tradition of trade between Bukhara and Siberia which
began shortly after Genghis Khan's grandson Shaiban was given the territory
extending from the Irgiz to Bukhara in the thirteenth century. This was reinforced
after 1555 when the independent Siberian kingdom centered near the Tobol' river
was taken over by Kuchum, who claimed to share a common ancestry with the
Abilkhairid princes of the khanate, and who even asked ‘Abdallah for help in
converting his subjects to Islam. And after Kuchum's death Bukharan traders
continued to supply the Muscovite conquerors 'of the area.
Similar items were generally required by the indigenous inhabitants and by the
Muscovite

colonisers.

Bukharans

took the Kuchumites

materials

and horses,

exchanged them for furs, and later sold the furs in the khanate and even in Iran. Thus
they were able to supply Iran with so many Siberian black sables and black foxes in
the 1590s that by 1595 they had flooded the market. That same year 30 traders spent
the winter at Kuchum's settlement and during 1595-6 “Abdallah II sent Kuchum
kettledrums, bows, dorogi, velvet, satin, mel’ and sashes, asking for gerfalcons,
black sables and black foxes in return. Five years later 18 Bukharans took 150 horses
to sell in the camp of Kuchum's descendants, and it is known that in 1637 the
Kuchumite Princes sent 11 men to trade in Bukhara.! Similarly a variety of materials,

horses and cattle were taken to the Muscovite settlements of Siberia. Bukharans also
supplied them with Chinese materials, spices, tobacco, tea, rhubarb and gems, as
well as slaves. They took back furs, hunting-birds, woollen cloth, walrus tusks,

items of haberdashery, beads, and even metal goods and flour, which they sold in the
khanate or in one of their numerous ports of call.
Interestingly enough, although Kuchum was the inveterate foe of the Muscovites
settled in Siberia, he was indirectly responsible for the establishment of trading
relations between these settlers and Bukhara. Shortly after Kuchum conquered the
khanate of western Siberia, Ivan the Terrible decided that Muscovite settlements
should be founded in the Urals. This was mainly because Kuchum was markedly
reluctant to pay tribute to the Tsar as his predecessors had done, and it was thought
that his attitude might result in an attack on Muscovy in the future. Ivan IV
accordingly ordered the Stroganov brothers to build a fort on the Kama in 1564 in
order to protect the Perm area, and four years later he gave them land on the Chusova
for the same purpose. At this stage Kuchum tried to stop the Muscovite advance. He
agreed to pay tribute to the Tsar in 1572, but the following year he began to raid the
Muscovite settlements and prevented nearby tribes from paying tribute to the Tsar.
1 Pamyatniki, XX, 268. Materialy, 296. Miller, II, 168, 443-4,

Trade with Siberia

This could not be tolerated for long, but the Tsar was not in a position to try and
conquer Siberia himself. He therefore gave the Stroganovs a large area of land along
the Tobol' and Tura rivers in June 1574 and ordered them to defend it in two ways.
They should build fortresses at strategic points on the rivers Takcheev,2 Tobol’,
Irtysh and Ob’, and they should hire Cossack fighters to attack Kuchum's territory.
These new settlements would be even further from Moscow and more difficult to
supply than those on the Kama, but the Tsar hoped that this could be done by
requiring towns such-as Novgorod to send them corn and by establishing good
relations with the Bukharan and other traders who were known to visit the area. The
Stroganovs were told to permit (any) Bukharan, Qalmaq and Qazaq merchants who
might come to the new fortresses to trade freely without paying any taxes
whatsoever. Two months later Ivan the Terrible sent an envoy to Bukhara who was
accompanied by four clerks employed by the Stroganovs, and no doubt they saw to it
that Bukharans were made aware of these privileges.3
It is not known how successful the Tsar was in encouraging merchants to visit
Siberia, but the Muscovite settlements remained short of essential supplies and under
constant attack. Because of this, when Ermak, leader of the Cossacks hired by the
Stroganovs, heard in 1584 that Kuchum was preventing Bukharan traders from
reaching his men, he at once set off to ensure that they got through.* But this turned
out to be a wild goose chase, for no merchants had in fact come over. A rumour had
been put out in order to lure the Cossacks out of their entrenched position in
Kuchum's former capital, Kashlyk.> After a disappointing and tiring march up the
Irtysh to the river Vagai, Ermak and his 150 Cossacks turned back. Kuchum, who
was lying in wait, then attacked their camp at night and cut them all down.
When he was told of Ermak's death, Ivan the Terrible decided that the region
must be conquered. He despatched soldiers to western Siberia with instructions to
assist the Cossacks in getting rid of Kuchum and in forcing the local people to accept
his rule. This turned out to be a slow process. It was only completed under Boris
Godunov, after several expeditions had been undertaken and after many more forts
and palisaded towns had been built such as Tyumen’ (1586) and Tobol'sk (1587).®
The last serious encounter with Kuchum took place in 1598, but in the meantime
Ivan's son Fedor pursued his father's policy of trying to attract Bukharan traders to
the Siberian settlements. In February 1595, or only one year after the foundation of
Tara, the voevoda of this town, Eletskii, was told to ensure that government officials

(sluzhilye lyudi) purchased all the goods, horses and cattle which Bukharans and
Noghay traders might bring over. They should be considerate towards the visitors in
order to encourage them to come again, and should send them on their way, without
holding them back, as soon as they finished trading (and wished to leave). If any
traders did come in transit with the sole intention of trading in Tobol'sk or Tyumen’,
they ought to be allowed to go through and provided with an escort. If Bukharans
2 Not found.
3 Slovtsov, XVIIIn., XIXn, XXn. Istoriya Sibiri, 26-27. Sibirskiya letopisi, 54. Vvedenskii,
Torgovyi dom, 94.
4 This date is taken from the Sibirskiya letopisi, 147-8, 341. Okladnikov and Shunkov, on the
other hand, place Ermak's expedition in 1585. Istoriya Sibiri, 30.
5 This was situated not far from the present site of Tobol'sk.

Bukharan trade

began to come over in large numbers and to enquire about local or state affairs, they
were not to be detained. However, the voevoda was required to send the Tsar a full
report upon their enquiries after they left, together with a list of the corn, money,
naryad (clothes?) and firearms which had been supplied to them.’ Interestingly
enough, nothing was said here about any limitation on the range of goods available to
the merchants, perhaps because Tsar Fedor had decided to waive the prohibition on
‘the sale of gerfalcons and expensive sables and foxes to Bukharans’ which his
ambassador to Iran had mentioned to the Shah only a few months earlier, in the
autumn of 1594.8
The freedom of movement and generous treatment promised to Bukharans in
1595 cannot have had the desired effect, for nineteen months later Tsar Fedor
thought it necessary to offer them additional incentives. On 10 September 1596 he
issued a new set of instructions to Eletskii. In these instructions, which have been
outlined in a previous chapter, the voevoda was told that Bukharans and Noghays
should be allowed to trade in Tara with (ordinary) Russians and settled Tatars. This

was a sizeable concession, for it gave them greater freedom of action and no doubt
enabled them to get better value for their goods, whereas the previous ruling gave
them no option but to accept the fixed prices uniformly offered by “serving-men’.
Another concession followed which Tsar Fedor considered so important, that he
took care to explain it more than once, for it went against the rules which applied in
Muscovy, both to Muscovite and to other traders. Merchants would be able to trade
without paying dues, he decreed, and in case the message was not clear enough he
specified that no Customs dues of any kind should be taken from them. The voevoda
would no longer be directly involved in their trading activities, but he was still
expected to look after them, to be kind to them, and to protect them from offence or
violence, so that ‘they should feel encouraged to return in the future with all manner
of goods’.
The particular importance attached to Bukharans is clear from the next two
recommendations to Eletskii for they referred specifically to ‘Bukharans and all
manner of foreigners’. These merchants should be permitted to ‘trade outside the
town’, i.e. outside the city walls and they could do so, either in the posad, by which
the Tsar meant the trading-quarter,? or beyond it, although their activities should be
strictly watched to ensure that they only dealt in permitted goods. The voevoda was
to prevent them from selling a whole range of zapovednye tovary for which a military
use could be found, such as coats of mail, suits of armour, sabres, knives and axes,
either to those Tatars who were the Tsar's subjects, or to those who merely paid
tribute (yasak) to him.
This was clearly aimed at preventing Kuchum, who was still threatening the

Muscovite settlements, from obtaining supplies. The next recommendation was also
relevant to the fight against Kuchum and applied both to Bukharan and to Noghay
traders, perhaps because it was thought that the Noghays might spy on Kuchum's
behalf in view of his son's recent marriage to a Noghay princess.!° If any Bukharan

7 Miller, I, 365-6.
8 Pamyatniki, XX, 268.
9 Posad also meant the community of traders and craftsmen who paid tyaglo.
10 Slovtsov, XIXn. Istoriya Sibiri, 35. However, according to Remezov, when Kuchum sought
refuge with the Noghays, he was killed by them.

504

Trade with Siberia

or Noghay traders wished to enter the town of Tara in order to convey an official
message, Eletskii was told, he should certainly grant them an interview. But first he
should make sure that armed ‘serving-men’ and others thronged the streets of the
town and its highly fortified stockaded citadel, and that a pristav was allocated to the
merchants throughout their stay.
Having thus dealt with the need to keep a close check on the activities of such
merchants and to impress them with Tara's ability to withstand an assault, Tsar
Fedor returned to the main theme and purpose of his letter, namely the promotion of
trade.!! Repeating his earlier instructions about allowing traders to leave as soon as
they concluded their business, he explained that he did not want them to incur any
loss through unnecessary delay. They should be told to come (back) to Siberia
bringing all manner of goods, for they would be allowed to trade and to sell their
goods freely in ‘all the Siberian towns’ and without paying any dues. A further
recommendation concerned those Bukharans who might have difficulty in selling off
their goods: they should be allowed to remain in the town for a year or for as Iong as
was necessary in order to conclude their business, during which time they were to be
well looked after and protected from harm.
The remainder of the letter showed that, although supplies for Siberia were
desperately needed, Tsar Fedor and his capable brother-in-law Boris Godunov were
highly suspicious of the Bukharans and Noghays. The voevoda and his companions
were asked to send exhaustive lists to Moscow of the names and goods of all
Bukharan and Noghay traders, together with their places of origin. That this was a
security measure and not one introduced for some statistical purpose, is made clear
by the next sentence in which the voevoda was urged to keep a tight watch over all
the traders. They must be prevented from inspecting the fortifications of the town or
spying, he was told, and even from speaking to Russians and Tatars except on trade
matters. They must not be told of any shortages in Siberia. On the contrary they must
be assured that Muscovite Siberia was neither short of men nor short of supplies, this
being an essential piece of defensive propaganda prompted by news that Kuchum
had diplomatic relations with Bukhara and with the Noghays, and that they were

planning a joint attack on the Siberian towns.!2
Before Eletskii could carry out the Tsar's instructions, however, an unfortunate
incident occurred, which deterred Bukharans from trading with Muscovite Siberia for
some time. This incident took place only six days after the Tsar's instructions had
been despatched, at a crossing of the river Irtysh situated about 20 days away from

Tara. That night a detachment of Cossacks, sent with instructions to prevent
Noghays or Bukharans from crossing the river and joining Kuchum in an attack on
the Muscovite settlements, attacked a party of men on the other side of the Irtysh.
They killed several of them and captured eight, but on interrogation it was found that
these men were the survivors of a party of 29 Bukharan traders, half of whom had
intended to trade with Kuchum, while the other half had been on their way to the
Muscovite towns of Siberia. When Eletskii found out that these were peaceful traders
11 Tp fact the letter probably reflects Boris Godunov's concern rather than Tsar Fedor's, the Tsar
being weak-willed, simple and totally dominated by his capable brother-in-law.
12 Materialy, 107-8, 296. Kuchum had indeed asked ‘Abdallah to send him some soldiers some

time earlier, and probably in 1595, but ‘Abdallah explained in his answer, which has been dated

to 1595-6, that he himself was then at war and he needed the men. See chapter 3 above for

‘Abdallah's campaigns to Khurasan and Khwarazm in 1595.

505

Bukharan trade

he at once ordered their goods to be traced and returned to them, but Tsar Fedor ruled
otherwise in his letter of 1 January 1597. Only those who had been on their way to
Muscovite Siberia should get their goods back. The others must lose them to the
Treasury and Eletskii was told to inform Bukharan and Noghay traders that in the
future, although the Tsar would welcome all those who came to trade in Muscovite
Siberia and would exempt them from dues, he would send his army against those
wanting to supply Kuchum.!3
Not surprisingly the killings of September 1596 caused a setback to the incipient
Bukharan and Noghay trade with Muscovite Siberia. The effects of this were soon
felt, a Siberian Muslim writing to Tsar Fedor before the end of 1597 to complain that
no traders were coming over ‘from anywhere’ and that they were short of
everything. He begged for ambassadors to be sent from Siberia to Bukhara and to the
Noghays so that ‘the land should benefit’ and so that, thanks to the traders’ activities,
all should ‘put on weight and feel sated’. He also pleaded for the release of two
Bukharans detained in Siberia, saying that the Tsar's subjects were deriving no profit
from them, which might mean that the men were merchants whose detention was
merely depriving Muscovites of the benefit of trading with them. He went on to say
that the men were constantly crying and that to keep them in the country against their
will was unkind. If, as this implies, they had committed no offence, it is tempting to
assume that they might have been among the merchants involved in the incident on
the Irtysh of September 1596. Sadly, we do not know whether the Tsar heeded
Baiseit Murza's request and released the men in question. However, Bukharans soon
resumed and even developed their trade with Siberia.

They were so successful, in fact, that in 1599-1600 Boris Godunov thought it
necessary to re-introduce and expand the earlier prohibition concerning the sale of
furs. He strictly forbade the sale of top quality sables, black foxes, best beavers and
best squirrels to either Bukharan or Noghay merchants, adding that such merchants
had been purchasing the furs in the encampments of the Voguls and Ostyaks (in the
Tyumen’ area) and taking them out of the province. These furs now became
zapovednye tovary, reserved exclusively to the Tsar and, through him, to the foreign
rulers whom he considered his friends. This regulation must have affected Bukharan
traders, but they did not give up Siberia. They made their way there in such numbers
that the authorities decided to build a gostinyi dvor for foreign visitors and the first
wooden gostinyi dvor of Tobol'sk was accordingly erected in 1601. Two years later
several ‘noblemen of good lineage’ were despatched from Tobol'sk to Bukhara as
ambassadors in the company of at least two Muscovite traders called Ftoroi Ozerov

and Mikhailo Vatagin.!4
Even during the Time of Troubles an effort was made to maintain the commercial
connection with Bukhara. Boris Godunov's successor, Vasilii Shuisky, was well

aware of the need to encourage Bukharan trade in Siberia. Within a year of his
accession, in 1607, Tara voevoda Sila Gagarin was accordingly instructed to send an
ambassador to Bukhara. And when news came that the mission had failed to get
through, owing to Qalmagq internecine fighting, the Tsar repeated his intructions. In
March 1608 the next Tara voevoda, Mosal'skii, was ordered to send ‘anyone
13 Tbid., 296-9.
14 §.G.G.D., Il, 129. TsGADA, fond 214, op.1, kn. 11, listy 59b-60a. Materialy, 71. Kopylova,
291-2. Materialy po istorii russko-mongol'skikh otnoshenii, I, 49.

506

Trade with Siberia

suitable’ to Bukhara so that he might persuade ‘traders and teziki to come over with
all manner of goods’. When these traders arrived, they should at first be permitted to
trade without paying dues, in order to encourage them to return. Mosal'skii was to
protect them from ‘offence or violence’, to provide them with safe-conducts if they
wished to trade in other Siberian towns, and to allow them to leave as soon as they
were ready to do so.
It is not known whether the embassy of March 1608 achieved its purpose and
whether, as Vasilii Shuisky had intended, Bukharans did begin to trade in Tara.
However, in other Siberian towns their trading connection was so well established

that by November 1609 they were being asked to pay trade dues. The dues
demanded in Tobol'sk and Tyumen' consisted of two separate payments of 20 den'gi
per rouble, both of which bore the identical name of desyataya poshlina or ‘onetenth tax’, because 20 den'gi was the tenth part of a rouble. One of these payments
was a combined import and sales tax which may also have included a Customs
declaration fee, the other was a purchase tax based on the value of the furs which
they bought or bartered in exchange for their goods. The authorities felt confident
that these taxes would not deter Bukharans from visiting Tobol'sk and Tyumen’,

because, as the Turinsk voevoda Godunov explained in a letter to his colleague at
Verkhotur'e on the frontier with Muscovy, they ‘had been going (there) for a long
time’. In Turinsk, on the other hand, the situation was different, because very few
Bukharans reached the town, and the goods which they brought were of little value.
In the circumstances, it was thought sufficient to tax merchants only once in Turinsk
by making them pay the import fee of 20 den'gi per rouble. And no increase in tax
was planned there in the future, Godunov added, even if they did start coming over

in greater numbers.!5
Thus by 1609, although no separate declaration tax or transit dues seem to have
been required from them, Bukharan merchants appear to have paid higher dues in
Siberia than in Muscovy, for they were charged 20 den'gi per rouble as an importcum-sales tax on their goods, as against 11 den'gi per rouble, plus an additional 20
den'gi on their purchases. No doubt warehousing and transport dues were also
payable, as in Muscovy, although the general system of taxation seems to have been
less complex.
The high level of dues which was required from them did not deter Bukharan
traders from travelling to Siberia, for, in contrast with Muscovy, their lives were not
in danger there during the Time of Troubles. In 1611 a Polish prisoner of war who
had earlier lived in captivity in Tobol'sk told a factor of the Muscovy Company called
Josias Logan, that ‘the Teseeks (teziki), Bowhars (Bukharans) and Tartars (come)
thither to trade, who bring Silkes, Velvets, Grograns, Sendames (zenden') and
kindackes (kindyak)’. Some three to four years years later, William Gourdon, who
worked as a pilot for the Muscovy Company, wrote that “The Russe have a yearely
trade with the merchants of Boghar at a place called Tumen in Tartaria whither they
of Boghar come with Camels every yeare’. Bukharans either travelled directly to
Siberia from the khanate, or else they went there from Muscovy, for it is known that
at least some merchants went from Ufa to Tyumen' in 1600 and 1611, and others

went from Kazan' to Tobol'sk in 1618.16
15 Materialy po istorii russko-mongol'skikh otnoshenii, 1, 29. Materialy, 109.
16 Alekseev, Sibir’, 211. Purchas, XIII, 232. Baddeley, II, 24. The references given here for Logan

507

Bukharan trade

However, not enough traders arrived in the early years of Mikhail Romanov's
reign to provide fully for the needs of Muscovite Siberia. In the autumn of 1616 the
new Tsar accordingly decided to write to ‘the Savran ruler of the Qazaqs Ablakan’ (a
confused reference, either to the long-departed ‘Abdallah II, or to Abuli Sultan who
was active near Turkestan in 1613) ‘telling him to send over traders with all manner
of goods to Tobol'sk and (other) Siberian towns’. In return Ablakan was required by
the Tsar to ‘allow (Muscovite) traders into all his towns and back without delay,
causing them no offence and granting them his protection’. He was also asked to
help the Tsar's troops to deal with the Qalmaq who were camping without
permission on the Tsar's lands and were causing offence to both sides, thus
presumably interfering with their joint trade. In the event no ambassador was
despatched that autumn because the Tsar's letter had arrived too late in the season for
the Tobol'sk voevoda Kurakin to organise a mission to Savran. However, Kurakin
had made enquiries and was able to report that the ruler of Savran was in fact Imam
Quli's vassal. He suggested therefore that an ambassador be sent instead to the ruler
of Bukhara, and asked for guidance as to the wording of the letter to be despatched
with the ambassador and the gifts which might be considered suitable for such an
important ruler. He also informed the Tsar regretfully that, in contrast with the
situation 13 years earlier, there was no longer any ‘nobleman of good lineage’ in
Tobol'sk who could be entrusted with such a mission.
In the same letter Kurakin stated his objections to a proposed new regulation
which would extend the term ‘zapovednye’ to cover most of the furs available in
Siberia. If sables, martens, black foxes, beavers and squirrels were removed from
the open market and were no longer sold to visiting Bukharan traders, he wrote, then
these merchants would stop coming to Siberia altogether. They never bought the
better furs (foxes, beavers or top quality sables), he explained. They only came over
in order to buy low-quality sables and they would refuse to buy anything else. As a
result the Treasury would lose the income accruing from the (import) fee payable on
(their) goods and the ‘serving-men (sluzhilye lyudi) stationed in Siberia would suffer
great privation, for their supply of clothes would cease and they would ‘have no
clothes’
.!7 It is not known whether or not Kurakin's objection was heeded, but the
Tsar did take his advice regarding Imam Quli. He decided that the Bukharan ruler
should be approached with regard to trade and accordingly instructed the voevoda on
11 January 1617 to write to Imam Quli about ‘all manner of goods’ as soon as he had
found out his exact title from Moscow. Kurakin was also told rather bluntly that no

gifts were to be despatched (with his letter).!8
Within the next three years, however, Tsar Mikhail issued three rulings which
severely restricted the activities of traders. The first, said to have been issued in
1618, strictly prohibited the sale of tobacco in Siberia. The second, also in about
1618, forbade any trade in hawks and hunting-birds. And the third, in 1620, forbade
the import into Siberia of a range of military items ranging from knives to suits of
armour, together with ordinary iron goods such as pans and ploughshares.!9 With

and Gourdon are incorrect. Ziyaev, Ekonomicheskie svyazi, 26.
17 Materialy po istorii russko-mongol'skikh otnoshenii, I, 46, 49-50.

18 Thid., 55.

19 Andrievich, I, 175, gives no supporting evidence for his claim that tobacco sales were prohibited

508

Trade with Siberia

regard to tobacco, the devout Tsar was probably as concerned by the innate

‘wickedness’ of smoking, as by its harmful effects on his ‘serving-men’.2° In the

case of the hunting-birds, the motivation for the prohibition was quite different. He
simply wanted to keep them for his own personal use or for distributing as valuable
gifts. The first two prohibitions will have undoubtedly affected the Bukharan trade
and, perhaps in order to soften their impact, Tsar Mikhail halved the rate of the
import dues which Bukharan merchants had to pay, the new dvadtsataya (onetwentieth) rate being 10 den'gi per rouble. The exact date when the lower dues were
introduced is not known, but they had been in force for some time when Imam Quli's
ill-fated ambassador Chobak Balykov and the merchants accompanying him reached

Tyumen’ in late November 1622.21
The Tsar's determination to stamp out the trade in gerfalcons and tobacco was
shared neither by his Siberian subjects, nor by his vassals, who particularly loved
smoking and who used gerfalcons as a basis for barter. He therefore had to repeat
these rulings a few years later. In a letter to the voevoda of Tobol'sk in 1623 he made
it clear that no one was allowed to trade in gerfalcons, or even to catch them and keep
them for his own pleasure, the penalty for either of these offences being death.22
Four years later, in March 1627 he issued new orders regarding tobacco. He wrote to
the voevoda of Tobol'sk, explaining that merchants had been taking tobacco from
Muscovy to Siberia, where they sold it at the high price of over 100 roubles per pud
(16.38 kg). This had two serious consequences: his ‘serving-men’ were getting into
debt in order to buy it and they were also neglecting their various enterprises. He
therefore banned both the import and the purchase of tobacco in Siberia and he gave
orders for any supplies which traders might take there to be confiscated during their

stay and returned to them only when they left.73
Whether or not the new rules were successful in preventing tobacco imports from
Muscovy, they had no adverse effect on the numbers of Bukharans and other traders
who visited Siberia. On the contrary, their numbers grew to such an extent that when
the Tobol'sk gostinyi dvor was destroyed in the fire of 1629 a new one nearly three
times as big had to be erected. Meanwhile Tara, as well as Tobol'sk and Tyumen’,
were fast becoming major centres for Bukharan settlement and trade. Bukharan
settlers tilled the land in several villages situated near these towns. They also engaged
in trade or even acted as Customs officials and ‘serving-men’.24
The trading activities of these Siberian Bukharans were heavily taxed. Like the
Tsar's Muscovite subjects, they were liable to a multitude of taxes, the most

in 1618. Pamyatniki, XXII, 451. The prohibition regarding hunting-birds was in force in
Muscovy from 1618, as noted with anger by the Shah when his trading agent in Russia was
forcibly relieved of a hawk by the authorities. A./., III, 87.
20 See above about the alleged dangers incurred when smoking tobacco.

21 Miller, II, 289.
22 Materialy, 138.
23 R.I.B., VII, 451. The word used to indicate these enterprises is promysel, which could mean
anything from fishing to trapping, including home crafts and even growing crops, whether this
was solely for the promyshlenniki's own use, or also for the Tsar's benefit. Mezhov, Sibirskaya
bibliografiya, I, 31.

24 Vilkov, "Torgovye pomeshcheniya", 92. Shunkov, Ocherki po istorii zemledeliya, 52. Ziyaev,
"K istorii bukhartsev", 93-94. Ogloblin, I, 51-2, 64, 201; II, 22.

509

Bukharan trade

important of which was the desyataya, the 20 den'gi in the rouble which they
continued to pay on their imports of fish, gingerbread, materials, hats, tin dishes and
copper cooking-pots, long after the rate charged to their visiting brethren had been
reduced to 10 den'gi in the rouble. This high rate of tax did not prevent them,
however, from travelling far and wide to acquire goods. They visited the khanate,
China, the Qalmaq and the various Siberian tribes, purchasing Bukharan goods either
at Yamysh or from Bukhara itself, despite the high risk of being attacked en route. In
1642, for example, a group of 25 Tobol'sk Bukharans set off for the khanate,
leaving the town in the company of a returning Qalmaq delegation. And within a few
days of leaving Tobol'sk their Qalmaq companions killed them all and took their

possessions.25
Visiting Bukharans had problems too, but of a different nature. Although they
benefited from a lower rate of tax than their settled brethren, they had to face the

hostility, mistrust and high-handed behaviour of the authorities, probably because of
their known links with the Kuchumites and the Qalmaq Princes. Thus in 1631, when
the voevoda of Tara was preparing to retaliate against a Qalm4q attack, he helped
himself to the horses of the Bukharan traders who were then in the town, and when
he reported the matter to his Tobol'sk colleagues in December he gave no hint that he
would either return the horses or pay for them. In late 1637 a Kuchumite mission,
which included 22 Bukharan traders, also had an unpleasant experience in Tara.
Although they brought a peaceful and friendly message from the Kuchumite Dalai
who offered to become the Tsar's vassal and asked permission for Bukharan traders
to come to Siberia via the Qalmaq encampments, the party was refused permission to
stay in the town. Worse still, the authorities tried to make them leave at once, the

excuse for such a speedy dismissal being that ‘disturbances’ were likely to take place
if they were allowed to remain in Tara. The voevoda probably feared that the Qalmaq
or the Kuchumites might attack, allegedly in order to release them, as in 1636 when
the Derbet Qalmaq Kuisha threatened to attack because the Bukharan Kazii Kaziev
had been detained there. The Kuchumite ambassador begged either to be spared the
difficult return journey in the winter weather, or else to be given a month's grace,
and this was only agreed with the greatest reluctance. But when the party left, having
rested their horses, they were sent back through empty and well-fortified places, with
an escort who was ordered not to let them see or inspect anything on their way.26

Some years later trade in the town of Tyumen' was prohibited. Bukharan traders
found out about this in November 1646 when they accompanied a Qalmaq delegation
sent by the widow and son of the Derbet Daichin, and were stopped outside the
town, on the river Pishma. They were told to go and trade instead in Tobol'sk, a
suggestion which the Qalmaq ambassador firmly rejected, saying that he had been
sent to Tyumen’ and that his cattle would die if they had to continue so far.27 He even
threatened to leave at once, but he was not allowed to do so, because the Tyumen’
voevoda, Ivan Pushkin, had reported on the matter to Tobol'sk and was awaiting the
instructions of the most senior of Siberian officials.
After careful consideration of the situation, the Tobol'sk voevoda, I. Saltykov,

finally ruled that the Qalmaq party should be permitted to trade locally, but not within

25 Ogloblin, II, 22-23, 37, 103. Lipinskii, 29.
26 Miller, II, 384-5, 445-7. Materialy po istorii russko-mongol'skikh otnoshenii, I, 26-27

27 This meant more than 100 miles (160 km) extra.

510

Trade with Siberia

the town. This concession was due to fear of retaliation by the Qalmagq if trade was
forbidden altogether. However, the ambassador was told that in future Qalmag and

Bukharans should go and trade in Tobol'sk, and not in Tyumen'.28 Saltykov then

asked Tsar Aleksei for future instructions, but none had come by the time a second
Qalmaq delegation arrived outside Tyumen' in July 1647, about eight months later.
The Bukharans accompanying this delegation told officials of the puzzlement and
anger felt by Daichin's widow, Dara'ika. They also threatened the officials with
‘trouble and war’ if the Qalmaq ambassador was not received in the town. But the
voevoda stood firm. Refusing to let him into the town, he repeated that in future
embassies could only be sent to Tobol'sk. The Qalmaq ambassador's reply is not
recorded, but he seems to have taken the refusal philosophically and to have merely
asked what might have caused the new ruling, for if some of the Qalmaq had robbed
or insulted (the Tsar's subjects) they would be disciplined.
Although this new restriction on trade had probably been introduced, once again,
for reasons of security, it must have been a great disappointment to the Qalmaq and
to the Bukharans. The Bukharans involved in July 1647 were particularly vocal
about it, as the embassy was the third one in succession to be turned away. They

even hinted at reprisals involving the tribes which paid tribute to the Tsar.?9
Meanwhile,

whether

or not imports

of tobacco

from

Muscovy

had been

discontinued as a result of the 1627 ruling, the tobacco trade had not been eradicated
in Siberia. In 1634 Tsar Mikhail was forced to issue a new edict forbidding the sale
of tobacco under pain of death, which seems to have applied both to Muscovy and to
Siberia. This being no more successful than the preceding edicts, his successor,
Aleksei, decided in March 1646 to sell tobacco directly to the settlers in Siberia
through specified agents appointed for one year who were sent over from Moscow.
They were told to sell at whatever price was possible and were allowed to travel
freely in the whole of Siberia. The following year new agents were appointed, but in

February 1648, about a month before their year of office came to an end, they were
abruptly dismissed and ordered to hand over their stocks of tobacco to the various
Siberian voevody before making their way to Moscow under escort with the money
they had collected. No explanation was given for their dismissal, but they had
probably been unpopular because they were not local people, and because they sold
the tobacco at a high price which Klyuchevskii describes as close to the price of

gold.3°
From February 1648 Tsar Aleksei tried a new approach. He decided to set the sale
price for government tobacco himself and to have limited amounts sold by local
traders. The Siberian voevody were accordingly instructed to take back any tobacco
still held by the Tsar's agents. Each voevoda was told to select two ‘reliable, well-todo Siberian traders’ and then swear them into office, entrusting them with the task of
selling between 1 and 2 lb of tobacco for the Tsar. He was to keep a tight check on
their activities in order to ensure that the new agents conducted these sales honestly,

28 Miller, II, 114.
29 Tbid., Il, 519-22. Materialy po istorii russko-mongol'skikh otnoshenii, Il, 294-5. Both these
sources appear to refer to the same embassy, although their accounts differ on certain points, such
as the numbers of men involved.

30 p.§.z., I, 154. D.A.L., Ill, 47, 98. Mezhov, Sibirskaya bibliografiya, 1, nos. 552, 559, 560.

Klyuchevskii, Kurs, III, 281. The first agents were also instructed to collect the salt tax and
‘cook’ saltpetre. The second ones were to collect the salt, wine and tobacco taxes.

Bukharan trade

without mixing in either fraudulent additives, or their own tobacco, and also that they
compiled exact lists of their sales, with names of purchasers and quantities
purchased. The sale of tobacco by anyone else was strictly forbidden, and defaulters
were to be punished ‘without mercy’.
The price fixed by the Tsar was high, at 8 den'gi per zolotnik (4.26 gr.) for ‘raw
tobacco’ and 10 den'gi per zolotnik for ready ground tobacco, i.e. 153.6 and 192
roubles per pud, or far more than the 100 roubles which ordinary merchants had
charged before 1627. Yet this was probably less than his own agents had charged in
1646 and 1647, and purchasers would be sure to get good tobacco, as against the
inferior mixtures which had often been supplied previously. The Tsar would derive
an additional benefit from the sales because there was no need to provide escorts,
carts, or translators for local traders, as there had been when his agents had come
over from Muscovy. A further saving in administrative costs would result, as it
would no longer be necessary to send money from Moscow for the purchase of
sables if, as directed, the proceeds of sale were used locally for this purpose.3!
However, the Tsar's expectations came to nothing, because the price of tobacco
was too high for most people in Siberia. Instead of buying it from the traders
appointed by the Tsar, they took to sowing or importing the forbidden leaf. As for
the traders concerned, their services were abruptly dispensed with ten months later.
The exact reason for their dismissal is not known, but whether they had engaged in
dishonest practices, had sold more than the permitted quantities, or had failed to sell
any at all, orders were sent in December 1648 for the whole of their tobacco supplies
to be seized, listed carefully and consigned to the flames. The Tsar also directed that
in future no one should grow the forbidden plant, import it into Siberia or keep any

in stock. The penalties for breaking the law would be a sound whipping in the market
place, plus a large fine. In a letter to the voevoda of the northern outpost of
Mangazeia the Tobol'sk voevoda relayed the Tsar's instructions and asked his
colleague to forward to Tobol'sk a complete list of the quantities burnt, together with
the money which was collected by the traders before their dismissal.32
By this time the power and trading capacity of the settled Bukharans of Siberia,
who were generally known to the authorities as Tobol'sk Bukharans, had secured for
them the protection of the Tsars. Thus Tsar Mikhail took action when Alimko
Suleimanov and others complained that the voevody of Arkhangel'sk, Kazan' and
other towns had forced them to pay a combination of bribes, Customs dues at three
or four times the usual rate, and several taxes which they had never paid in the past.
In November 1644 the Tsar issued special instructions to all the voevody of
Muscovy. Henceforth, he ruled, they would not be allowed to harass the Tobol'sk
Bukharans in any way, to delay them, to impede them from buying or hiring carts,
nor should they take them to court except for cases of debt, robbery or murder. And
not content with giving them a definite advantage over their competitors when they
were trading away from home, the Tsar went on to exempt Tobol'sk Bukharans from
several taxes, and also confirmed their existing exemptions.
Because of their status as recent immigrants Tobol'sk Bukharans had been
exempt from the tithe (vydel'nyi khleb) on their crops and from the obrok on their

31 $.G.G.D., Ill, 435-6. D.A.1., Il, 139-40. Mezhov, Sibirskaya bibliografiya, I, nos. 568, 569.
R.1.B., VIII, 451. N.B. There were 96 zolotniki in a Russian Ib and 40 Russian Ib in a pud.

32 §.G.G.D., Ill, 443.

2 4

Trade with Siberia

premises and the value of their stock until 1633,33 although these taxes were
regarded as the subjects’ tribute to the Tsar and provided the wages of the soldiers
who ensured their safety. In 1633 the Bukharans of Tobol'sk and Tyumen’ were
ordered to pay obrok on their shops and businesses (promysel), then in 1635 an
attempt was made to extend this liability to all their possessions, in order to bring
them in line with the ordinary posadskie lyudi. Under the leadership of Alimko
(‘Alim) Suleimanov the Bukharans protested, saying that they were far too poor.
They explained that although they were only just surviving by tilling the land and
trading in their small shops, they were making ‘articles’ (izdeliya) for the Tsar in the
towns and forts and serving him (as required) for 6 to 12 months at a time. They
added that their fellow-Bukharans living in Kazan' and Astrakhan were not asked to
pay obrok, and their arguments carried the day. Tsar Mikhail confirmed their
exemption from these taxes, and also from the tyaglo and the extraordinary taxes
(pyataya or desyataya den'ga) which were raised at times of emergency.34 These
privileges eventually enabled Siberian Bukharans to become much wealthier and
more powerful, so that, in the second part of the seventeenth century, many of them
were able to purchase land instead of merely renting it. They also continued to serve
the Tsar as Customs officials as well as trading and diplomatic envoys. In so doing
they collected valuable information for the authorities about trading possibilities and
about the movements and intentions of the Tsar's nomadic neighbours. However,
their foreign origin was forgotten neither by the authorities, nor by their neighbours,
nor even, as will be seen, by the Siberian Bukharans themselves.

In 1649, according to a Soviet historian, a new difficulty was apparently put in
the way of all Bukharan traders in Siberia, for trading in rhubarb in the open market
became punishable by death. Ziyaev unfortunately gives no authority for his claim,
but from the evidence supplied by De Rodes, it is clear that some limitation had been

placed on the rhubarb trade by 1653, at least in Muscovy.35 Rhubarb, however, had
not been banned from the market, as it would have been if the Tsar had declared it a
zapovednyi tovar. It seems to have become merely what Mulyukin calls an ukaznyi
tovar. Merchants could still bring it to market, but ‘none but the Tsar was allowed to
buy it’. He intended to buy up all the stocks until he held the monopoly and he could
sell at his own price, De Rodes explained. The Tsar's decision seems to have
followed the discovery that, in addition to its uses as a dye, rhubarb root was also

valuable for medicinal purposes. From then on Bukharans had to sell rhubarb
33 TsGADA, fond 214, op.1, kn. 81, listy 35, 36. Tsar Mikhail had ruled in 1633 that those who
had shops and who were able to travel to Muscovy with goods and fur should be made to pay
obrok, but local Bukharans had protested against this rule in 1635, saying that they were poor
people, struggling to make a living and that their brethren living in Kazan’ and Astrakhan paid no
obrok.

34 TsGADA, fond 214, op.3, st. 134, listy 194-205. The Tobol'sk Bukharan spokesman is called
here Alamko Sulemanov,

Alimko

Seliman, Alim Suleman and Aklii Sulemanov.

P.S.Z., II,

816. Here is name is given as Suleeman Alimov. Ogloblin, I, 66. Ziyaev, "K istorii
bukhartsev", 94-95, says the Tsar's ruling was issued in 1645, but this was not so for the date on
the document in question was November 7153, i.e. November 1644. See S.G.G.D., IV, 284, for

the pyataya den’ga taken from all the inhabitants of Turinsk in 1674 to help with the war
against Turkey. N.B. Pyataya and desyataya den'ga were also known as pyatye and desyatye

den'gi.
35 Kurts, "Sostoyanie", 153. See chapter 14 above for further details about this.

513

Bukharan trade

exclusively to his agents, at whatever price these agents chose to set and, as this price
was generally lower than the one obtainable on the open market, they were bound to
lose much of their profit. But they continued to bring rhubarb to Siberia, as did their
Siberian counterparts, although the Siberian Bukharans paid twice as much in tax
(desyataya) on their imports as their brethren from the khanate. Large quantities were
brought to Tobol'sk, Tara and Tomsk in 1653-4. As much as 41 pud (671.58 kg)
was taken to Tomsk by a single Bukharan visitor in 1653, and a total of 13,538.07

kg (826.5 pud) was inported to Tara in 1653-4.3° The forbidden root was also
brought in illegally and was found repeatedly in the years 1652 to 1654 during
Customs checks of the goods carried by Bukharan traders, small ‘entrepreneurs’ and
others.37
Smuggling indeed appears to have been so successful that in 1657 Tsar Aleksei
decided to put an end even to the restricted rhubarb trade allowed so far. The new
regulation, which applied equally to Muscovites, Bukharans, Tatars and Siberians in
general, and which was issued to the voevody of .Tobol'sk and Verkhotur'e on 2
December, was as explicit as it was comprehensive. The purchase, barter, secret
trade, transport or import of both types of rhubarb, to Muscovy as well as to Siberia,
were strictly forbidden on pain of death. The Tsar had apparently accumulated such
quantities of the precious root that he was not éven interested in keeping the rhubarb
which might have been sold to his Treasury just before the prohibition came into
effect. He added therefore that all rhubarb sold to the Treasury in Tobol'sk and not
yet paid for should be returned. As a special concession, however, and in order to
minimise the losses which merchants might incur as a result, he permitted them to
take the rejected rhubarb over to Astrakhan. They would be allowed to sell it there,
but only to foreign visitors who would be required to send it out of the country at
once. As for any rhubarb which foreign merchants might bring to “Tobol'sk and
Siberia’ after the prohibition, it would be confiscated during their stay and returned
when they left the country.38
Although rhubarb had been such a valuable part of their Siberian trade the
Bukharans were not discouraged and they continued to trade with Siberia,
concentrating instead on their imports of Chinese materials which increased
dramatically in the next few years. They also introduced bad'yan into the Siberian
market in the 1660s, together with musk, tea and cinnamon, in addition to their more

usual supplies of materials and cooking-pots from the khanate, and livestock and furs

from the Qalmaq.?9
Siberian Bukharans similarly diversified their trade. In 1666 the group of Danish
officers already mentioned, who had been held prisoner in Tobol'sk for some years,
wrote that Tobol'sk Bukharans lived far better than the local Tatars. Their large and
well-built houses boasted big windows and doors, and were adorned with beautiful
stucco work and Chinese carpets. They themselves wore rich garments and prayed in
their own mosques. They traded with China, either directly or through agents. From
36 Ziyaev, Ekonomicheskie svyazi, 43-44. Potanin, "O karavannoi torgovle", 53. Materialy, 346-

9, 354-7. Ogloblin, II, 37, 103.
37 Ogloblin, III, 81.
38 P_S.Z., I, 426-7. S.G.G.D., IV, 27-30.
39 Materialy, 354-5, 344-51. Ziyaev, Ekonomicheskie svyazi, 34-6, 60, 66, 70. Ogloblin, IV

74.

514

Trade with Siberia

their twice yearly trips to China via Bukhara they each brought back 4 or 5 camels,
loaded with a variety of Chinese and Bukharan goods, which ranged from raw cotton
and kitaika to bad'yan and precious stones. The precious stones they apparently sold
secretly, no doubt to avoid taxes, but they sold their other goods openly in “upper
Tobol'sk’ where they had shops, and where no foreigners were allowed to trade. If
the prices offered for their Chinese goods in the upper town were too low, however,
they could take the goods back to their homes in the lower town, where, according to
the Danish exiles, thevarticles fetched a higher price. This may have been because the
lower town was not surrounded by walls, which made official control on trade more

difficult to enforce.4°
Meanwhile in 1664 Tsar Aleksei had placed new restrictions on the Siberian
trade. In his instructions of 19 February (2 March) to the newly-appointed Tobol'sk
voevoda, Aleksei Golitsyn, he gave orders for all tobacco dealers, whether Russian

or foreign, to be whipped publicly and thrown into prison for a week. As for the
tobacco confiscated from them it was to be burnt, in order ‘to discourage the people’.
Turning to the fur trade, he decreed that no trading should take place before the fur
tribute (yasak) had been collected, which seems to indicate that there had been some
decline either in the value or in the quality of the furs delivered to his officials. Then,
no doubt because illegal trading was taking place and merchants were acquiring their
furs without paying the correct trade dues, Tsar Aleksei went on to remind the
voevoda that goods should only be bought and sold within the confines of the
gostinyi dvor, and that merchants were not allowed to trade in local villages or in the
encampments of nomads. Goods sold outside the gostinyi dvor were to be
confiscated, and merchants who infringed this rule for the second time should be

whipped and sent to prison. New measures followed which applied to the transfer of
unsold goods from Tobol'sk to other towns in Siberia. This was permitted, but only
after ot'ezzhaya was charged and the items in question had been carefully listed on
transit passes. The passes would then be checked at the next port of call and this
ought to prevent merchants from selling any of the goods en route. No indication
was given of the rate of the ot'ezzhaya, but it was probably 4 den'gi per rouble, for
this was charged on Bukharan goods in Tomsk a few months later, on which a stamp
fee of 1 den'ga per rouble was also paid. Taken together these two taxes meant a
50% increase in the tax liability falling on Bukharan visitors, greatly reducing if not
eliminating any margin of profit.4!
As if determined to make Siberia less attractive to Bukharan visitors, Tsar Aleksei
continued his instructions to the voevoda with three new prohibitions, all of which

were bound to affect them adversely. First, as mentioned in the previous chapter, he
reiterated the ruling of 1599 and he expressly forbade the sale of sables, beavers,
foxes and ‘all good furs’ to Bukharans and other foreigners, adding that the export of
these items to Bukhara and other places was also forbidden. Then he made it clear
that Bukharan visitors must only conduct their trade within the confines of the
gostinyi dvor and that each one must trade for himself alone, rather than delegate this
task to an agent, a ruling clearly aimed at preventing malpractices, although it is not
clear what malpractices the Tsar had in mind. Perhaps he merely want to restrict the
scope of their activities, or else he feared that local agents might help Bukharans to
40 Anon., Beschreibung, 20, 22.

41 DAL, IV, 352-3. Golovachev, 155.
515

Bukharan trade

export forbidden goods and to sell their merchandise in towns which they were not
permitted to visit. The third prohibition was more far-reaching and potentially far
more damaging. Tsar Aleksei simply prohibited the export of money by Bukharans.
Although they would still be allowed to sell their goods for cash, they would no
longer be able to take any of the proceeds out of Siberia. The money should be spent
locally on the purchase of ‘Russian’ goods. This showed Tsar Aleksei's strong
protectionist attitude, but he can hardly have meant only goods made in Muscovy and
not in Siberia, as there were few Russian goods as such in Siberia.

The prohibition relating to the export of money was followed by a notable
concession, perhaps because the Tsar feared that it might seem too harsh and that,
contrary to his wishes, it might drive Bukharans out of Siberia altogether. It was
decreed that Russians would be permitted to sell Bukharans (an unlimited number of)
sables, provided that they were worth no more than 10 to 40 roubles per bundle of
40. This gesture was marred somewhat by the threat that followed, namely that any
Bukharan who attempted to take expensive sables, black foxes or money out of the
country, would be forbidden to accept money for his goods altogether and would be
forced to rely solely on barter. However, by stressing that they were banned from
exporting expensive sables the Tsar was in effect allowing Bukharans to take out the
cheaper sables, i.e., just the type of fur which they were most interested in, as
pointed out to his father in 1616 by voevoda Kurakin.
Neither the ruling about the export of money, nor the one about trading through
agents, can have pleased the Bukharans, however, for both of them greatly limited
their freedom and range of activities. However, the Tsar could hardly have allowed
silver and gold to leave the country at a time of acute shortage, when silver coins
were only just beginning to re-appear, having been withdrawn some time earlier in
favour of copper coins. No doubt they realised this, and because they also valued the
Tsar's concession relating to the export of sables, Bukharans continued to trade in

Siberia.42
They may have even continued to take rhubarb there, for the prohibition of 1657
had not put an end to the rhubarb trade. It had merely driven it underground. The
belief that rhubarb was a panacea for all ills had in fact increased demand to such an
extent that the Slavophile writer Krijanich had suggested in 1663 that it should be

grown in Astrakhan. In 1668 Tsar Aleksei ordered a survey of Siberia from Tobol'sk
to Yakutsk in the hope of finding rhubarb and other medicinal plants and as the
survey had failed to produce any major results, he gave orders for another survey to
be carried out in late 1675, this time in the vicinity of Verkhotur'e. In the meantime
the high cost and limited availability of rhubarb led his subjects and others to
smuggle the valuable root or else to pass off the low-quality rapontik for rhubarb.
This was noticed by the Swedish traveller Kilburger who wrote in 1673 that rhubarb

was generally smuggled into Moscow from Siberia during the winter months.43
Although the Novotorgovyi Ustav had been promulgated in Muscovy, its
provisions were not extended to Siberia at the time. The Tsar did not want to
42 D.A.1., IV, 355, 361. See Ziyaev, Ekonomicheskie svyazi, 65, 69, for agents taking Bukharan
goods from Tobol'sk to Tara and Narym. Materialy po istorii russko-mongol'skikh otnoshenii,
I, 50. See Klyuchevskii, Kurs, III, 281-5; Spasskii 1.G, Russkaya monetnaya sistema, 114-7;
and chapter 14 above, for the enforced use of copper instead of silver under Aleksei.

43 Krijanich, 45. Kopylov, Kul'tura, 44-46. A.1., IV, 560. Kurts, "Sochinenie", 106.

516

Trade with Siberia

discourage Bukharans and other foreigners from trading there by exacting dues in
gold and silver, or by introducing large proezzhaya fees. He was probably satisfied
with the income accruing from the new ot'ezzhaya dues, the import and purchase
dues, the storage fee of 50 den'gi for four weeks and the transport dues which, at
least since 1640, were 12 den'gi per sledge and 20 den'gi for every sazhen (2.13
metres) of a boat. For the same reason and despite his shortage of money the Tsar
did not increase Bukharan import dues. In 1671 Bukharan visitors were still paying
10 den'gi per rouble 6n imports of Chinese goods, or half the rate charged to their
Muscovite counterparts.44
By then the numbers of visiting Bukharans trading in Tobol'sk had grown
considerably. They came over, not only from the khanate, but also with every
Qalmaq embassy, and Tobol'sk Bukharans were expected to accommodate them all.
This was proving such an intolerable and onerous burden that in 1671 they petitioned
Tsar Aleksei to exempt them from it. Asking for Bukharan merchants and
ambassadors to be put up, instead, at the Qalmaq gostinyi dvor or in the homes of
local Tatars, the Tobol'sk Bukharans declared that if forced to offer further
hospitality to these visitors, they themselves would simply ‘perish’! It is not known
whether the Tsar granted their request, but if he did so, then visiting Bukharans
would have found it more difficult to trade, for the Qalmaq dvor of Tobol'sk, built in

1657, was some distance from the town.45
Four years later new restrictions were placed on the Siberian trade. First, in
February 1675 the export of black and pale blue polar foxes from Siberia to Muscovy
was prohibited. Voevoda Krushchev of Verkhotur'e, the main frontier and Customs
post between Siberia and Muscovy, was instructed to confiscate all such pelts,
whether held by Russians or by foreigners. This was a serious blow for merchants
who had bought the pelts in Siberia, paying the relevant purchase taxes and
transporting them to the frontier. In order to soften the blow and to minimise their
losses, therefore, Tsar Aleksei ordered the voevoda to pay for the confiscated pelts.
Six weeks later further instructions were sent to the same voevoda. Referring this
time to the zapovednye tovary, the Tsar made it clear that gunpowder, lead,
harquebusses, sabres, lances, knives, axes, armour, coats of mail, and all types of
weaponry were neither to be sold nor bartered to the Qalmaq, Mongols, Chinese,
Bukharans, Bashkir or any other foreigners. He referred to similar orders sent
previously all over Siberia, from Tobol'sk to the Amur and added that these orders
were to be kept secret. Similar orders were sent on the same day to Turinsk, and the
Tsar specified that neither the sale rior the barter, nor even the import of military
supplies by foreigners into Siberia was permitted. The reason for this sudden
prohibition, he explained, was the discovery of harquebusses among the Bashkirs,

the highly aggressive semi-nomadic people who lived around Ufa. Although they
were nominally the Tsar's vassals, the Bashkirs repeatedly attacked Muscovite
settlements, often selling their captives to Bukhara. A major Bashkir rebellion in
1662 had taken five years to quash, there had been a number of raids since, and the
situation which had been unstable since 1670, had recently got worse. It was
44 Ogloblin, II, 23-4. Golovachev, 143, 145, 148, 155. Materialy, 86. Aleksandrov, "K voprosu",
138.
45 TsGADA, fond 214, op.3, st. 348, list 61. D.A./., IV, 93. The Qalmaq gostinyi dvor of
Tobol'sk was built in 1657. Vilkov, "Torgovye pomeshcheniya", 93.

517

Bukharan trade

imperative, therefore, to prevent them from acquiring firearms which might make
them even more dangerous in the future.*°
The Tsar's new ruling does not appear to have been enforced with enthusiasm,
for in July 1675 he had to remind Krushchev that no one was permitted to import,
purchase or sell suits of armour in Siberia except for his own agents. He also
requested the voevoda to purchase 100 suits of armour on his behalf, the scale of his
request showing that such items must have been easily available in Siberia.*”
Tsar Aleksei's restrictions on the purchase and sale of weaponry were no more
effective than his prohibition of the rhubarb trade, for merchants soon found ways of
circumventing them. In January 1680 Aleksei's son, Fedor II, was told that envoys
from the Qalmagq, the Yakuts and the Ostyaks were conniving with Bukharans and
others to evade these restrictions and to defraud the Treasury. They apparently did so
as follows. The envoys went to Moscow on carts provided for them by the
authorities and with a suite which included a number of Bukharans. On leaving the
capital, they took back large quantities of goods, including military equipment such
as rifles, gunpowder and lead. When they got to Verkhotur'e they passed off the
goods of the ‘serving-men’ and Tatars in their escort, as well as the goods of the
visiting Bukharans in their suite, as their own official goods and refused to submit
them to Customs checks. Tsar Fedor was so incensed by this report that he ordered
all the weapons found to be confiscated without compensation.*8
Ten months later Fedor II turned his attention to rhubarb. It had become known
that rhubarb was being imported from Bukhara ‘and other parts’ into Tobol'sk, and
thence to Muscovy, by Bukharans and others. Either because the Tsar thought this to
be less dangerous than the secret trade in firearms, or because his stocks were low,
he took a more pragmatic view of this breach of existing regulations and decided to
regulate the existing trade, instead of continuing to ban it. The voevoda of Tobol'sk
was instructed to note down the quantities of top-quality rhubarb brought there and
the names of the merchants who wished to take it to Moscow. The list compiled by
the voevoda should then be sent to the capital and the merchants allowed to continue
on their way, after warning them against selling or bartering any of their consignment
en route. If by the time they reached Verkhotur'e they were found to have more
rhubarb than was entered on their transit passes, the excess should be seized for the

Treasury.49
Tsar Fedor's concession to the rhubarb traders failed to put an end to the
smuggling, probably because the price fetched on the open market was more
advantageous than that offered by the Treasury. Less than six months later he wrote
to the voevoda of Verkhotur'e about this. He had found out that ‘Russians’ and
foreigners were taking ‘the root rhubarb’ from Siberia to Moscow and selling it off
secretly, having first bribed the Verkhotur'e Customs officer to let in their goods

without proper checks. He directed the voevoda to impose a large fine of 100 roubles
upon the dishonest official, and to keep a close watch on him in the future. He was
also to check the goods of ‘serving-men’ and foreign traders on their way to Moscow
46 AL, IV, 539, 541-2. D.A.L, VI, 374-5. Materialy, 386-97. Materialy po istorii Bashkirskoi
ASSR, 29-31, 34-35.
47 4.1, IV, 559.

48 Ibid., V, 82-83.
49 Tid., V, 91.

518

Trade with Siberia

in order to put an end to the rhubarb smuggling. If any should slip through, Tsar
Fedor added ominously, the voevoda would incur his displeasure and be in total

disgrace.5°

Rhubarb smuggling into Muscovy, however, continued, as did the rhubarb trade
and the illegal export of gunpowder, lead and zapovednye tovary. Further attempts to
curb these malpractices had to be made by the Regent Sophia in 1683 and 1684, and

also by her successors.5!
But smuggling and illegal exports were not the only problems facing the
authorities. Corrupt local officials went on helping Bukharan merchants to defraud
the Treasury. Thus on several occasions during January 1684 visiting Bukharans and
Tobol'sk Bukharans travelling from China to Moscow got through Customs
inspections in Verkhotur'e after declaring only a fraction of the goods they carried.
When the Regent found out, she demanded an explanation from voevoda Mikhail
Tolstoy, who must have been hard-pressed to explain how his officials failed to
notice goods worth 21,713 roubles, or nearly seven times as much as the items
which had been offered for their inspection! *2 Similar incidents involving Tyumen'
and Tobol'sk Bukharans are related by Aleksandrov and he says that instead of
confiscating the goods of offenders by way of punishment, the authorities contented

themselves with imposing a fine of 30 den'gi per rouble.*3
Meanwhile in eastern Siberia the foremost Qalmaq leader of the time, the Sungar
Galdan, also known as Bushuktu Khan, took to sending Bukharan agents to trade on
his behalf in Irkutsk. The exact origin of these Bukharans

is not known, but,

whether they came from the khanate or from Kashghariya, they seemed happy to act
as his agents, and took their wives and children with them on their trading
expeditions. Thus in November 1684 Galdan's envoy was accompanied by 70 such
Bukharan

merchants,

who travelled on 170 camels with their wives, children,

possessions and tents, and who appear to have been treated by Siberian officials with
just as much courtesy as the envoy with whom they travelled.*4
This was no doubt necessary in the circumstances, because Galdan was capable
of causing extensive damage to Muscovite Siberia, but resident Bukharans appear to
have been viewed with great hostility by their Christian neighbours. In November
1685 the head of the Siberian Church went so far as to make a formal complaint
accusing Bukharan and Tatar converts of behaving insultingly towards the Orthodox
religion. He said that when a religious procession passed their way they kept their
hats on and made a point of swearing and cursing in front of the holy icons. Worse
still, they encouraged others to abandon their new faith and to return to the Muslim
faith, and they defiled fast-days by eating and drinking. These were serious
accusations indeed. The converts strongly refuted them, saying that they were totally
untrue and should be ignored. In August 1686, after hearing the evidence the Regent
decided that in future the conversion should only take place of those who truly
wanted to convert and against whom nothing untoward was known. And as for
50 Tbid., V, 100-1. TsGADA, fond 109, 1671-6, kn.4, listy 96b, 97b. Pazukhin and Daudov were
given 500 roubles each when they were sent to the khanate. This sum was to cover their salary
and expenses for an estimated 2 to 3 years, and also included a gratuity from the Tsar.

51 Thid., V, 526.
52 D.A.1., XI, 195.
53 Aleksandrov, "K voprosu", 137.

54 p.A.1., XI, 235-8. Rumyantsev, 294-7.
S19

Bukharan trade

should be told to behave
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upper
of
location. The whole
the
and
dvor
had been virtually destroyed on this occasion, together with the gostinyi
distance
some
moved
be
shops
rest of the town. It was suggested that the houses and
less serious
away from the palisaded walls so that the next fire might have
accept this
to
decided
Regent
the
ration
conside
consequences, and after due
that the
and
moved
be
should
homes
and
shops
the
all
that
decreed
suggestion. She
either
from
Tatar and Bukharan homes and shops should be rebuilt at a good distance
this
that
hoped
y
probabl
She
.
the homes of the posadskie lyudi or their churches
Tobol'sk
of
lyudi
ie
posadsk
the
by
felt
ent
would help to defuse the growing resentm
towards their Muslim fellow-townsmen and Bukharans in particular. In the aftermath
of the fire they had accused the‘unbelievers’ of purposely disrupting church services
by making their ‘revolting prayers and screaming’ coincide with them. They had
echoed the Metropolitan's complaints, alleging that the Muslims laughed loudly and
irreverently when processions went through their quarters and that they tried to entice
converts back to their faith.
The posadskie lyudi certainly resented the Tobol'sk Bukharans and not only for
religious reasons. They particularly begrudged them the tax exemptions which they
had received from the Tsar in 1644 and no doubt they hoped that their complaints
about the shocking behaviour of their Muslim fellow-citizens might induce the
Regent to repeal these privileges. But the Regent Sophia was only too aware of the
services rendered by the Bukharans and she took no such action. Instead she actually
renewed and extended the privileges of Siberian Bukharans. On 28 September 1686
instructions were sent out to the voevody of Astrakhan, Kazan’ and the northern
towns to this effect. Referring to the ruling of 1644 she explained that she wanted to
renew its provisions. Tobol'sk Bukharans were not to be detained during their
journeys to Muscovy. They should not be compelled to hire carts or buy boats, and
the voevody were ordered not to take bribes or presents from them. If the Bukharans
were taken to Court for anything except debts or robbery, the case against them was
to be dropped and not even mentioned in their travelling passes, so that no one
should detain them, insult them or cause them any loss.>7
The Regent was less concerned to protect the interests of visiting Bukharans.
That same year she issued a regulation concerning the fur trade which must have
affected them badly. The export of sables, permitted in 1664 in the case of the less
valuable pelts, was now totally prohibited, as was the export of black fox. This was
due to the decline in numbers of the sables available, their pelts having been

distributed far too liberally as wages and gifts by all previous Tsars. Bukharan

traders must have been very concerned about this regulation, for sables had always
55 p.§.Z., Ill, 355-6.
V
80,

,
I,
g

t 2) 19 b) 237, 2

> 274.

There

57 Ogloblin, Obozrenie, IV, 14-15. P.S.Z., II, 816-7.
520

were fires in the town

in |64 5, 165 ]’ 1662,

Trade with Siberia

figured high on their shopping-list, as items which sold well, both in the khanate and
in China. However, they continued to trade in western Siberia, for they could still
find a market there for their materials, horses, spices, tea and other goods, and they
could still purchase woollen cloth, various types of cheap fur and useful
haberdashery items for export. An additional incentive was the concession granted by
the Regent in that year, which enabled individual merchants to purchase (and
presumably export) weapons to the value of just under 40 roubles from the area.58
In eastern Siberia the choice of goods available was smaller, Qalmag and Qirghiz
attacks were a constant problem, and Muscovite traders were rare visitors. The
Regent, therefore made a special effort to attract Bukharans to the area. Hearing, in
1680, that a party of Bukharans had been killed near Krasnoyarsk and that their
belongings had been shared out among local officials, she demanded an end to this
sort of behaviour. She also gave orders for a special gostinyi dvor to be erected so
that Bukharans would be safe during their stay in the town. When some years later
she was told that the then voevoda of Krasnoyarsk, Shishkov, was making visiting
Bukharans pay excessive dues, seizing their less valuable merchandise and paying
very little for the remainder, she ordered that all such harassment should stop. She
even appointed Siberian Bukharans to the local Customs post to try and ensure that
their visiting brethren were assessed more fairly. And she offered visiting merchants
a special incentive by allowing a total of 400 sable pelts from the tribute collection to
be bartered against Bukharan goods on condition that the transaction resulted in a

profit for her Treasury.5?
The safety of merchants in eastern Siberia was of particular concern to the
Muscovite authorities. In 1688 they forbade merchants visiting Irkutsk to travel even
to nearby Tunkinsk without a strong official escort, and the voevoda was told that
any who had been foolish enough to set off without an escort should be compelled to
return to the town, for they were likely to be attacked en route by the ‘Mongols’.
This policy was proved to be correct on more than one occasion. That same year, for
example, a group of Qalmaq and Bukharan merchants who had refused an escort in
Irkutsk were attacked on their way to the town of Turinsk in western Siberia and

some of them were killed, while others were robbed.
Meanwhile merchants were taking advantage of the feast of Epiphany to smuggle
goods on a large scale to the January fair of Irbit, west of Tyumen’. The Regent was
told that on the day of the festival particularly large numbers of Muscovites and
foreigners went there, by-passing Verkhotur'e and trading without paying dues. In
view of the resulting loss in Customs

dues on Bukharan, Chinese and Russian

goods, it was imperative to act energetically against this practice. The voevoda of
Verkhotur'e was accordingly instructed in 1687 to enlist a number of men who
would act as sworn assistants for his Customs officers on the day in question, but he
appears to have ignored his instructions, for the instructions had to be repeated in

1689.
Verkhotur'e being on the internal frontier between Muscovy and Siberia, it was

58 Aleksandrov, "K voprosu", 138.
59 Ziyaev, Ekonomicheskie svyazi, 71-72. Bakhrushin, Nauchnye trudy, IV, 122, 135-6. Zaklind,

190-1.

60 TsGADA, fond 1121, op.1F, no.128, list 92. Zaklind, 191, says the first Bukharan caravan to
reach Irkutsk arrived there in 1685. Rumyantsev, 339-57. Chimitdorzhiev, "K istorii".

521

Bukharan trade

this was
particularly important for officials there to be honest as well as vigilant, but
when
offenders
worst
the
were
fro
and
to
rarely the case. The voevody who travelled
at
wrote
Great
the
Peter
1692
July
In
items.
forbidden
other
it came to furs and
to
him
ordered
and
matter
the
about
'e
Verkhotur
of
chief
Customs
new
the
to
length
keep a particularly close watch on the activities of the voevody and their families. He
also made it clear that he would follow his predecessors’ example by reserving dark
brown sables and foxes for his own use. No one was permitted to possess any, he
decreed, even if listed in his transit pass. Forbidden furs, he added, and goods such
as wine, mead and tobacco, should be confiscated, and the merchants who carried
them should be thrown into prison. An exception, however, would be made for
traders who had been issued with travelling papers in which these goods were listed.
Since the papers ought not to have been issued in the first instance, the merchants
would be compensated. Peter the Great was determined to be fair, although he was
equally determined to stamp out abuse and to enforce existing rules with regard to
tobacco and furs. His attitude must have caused.some concern among Bukharan
merchants, for they had certainly been carrying tobacco through Siberia four years
earlier and they may well have intended to continue doing so.6! Worse still, the Tsar
strictly forbade the export of slaves from Siberia to Muscovy by voevody, officials,
traders, entrepreneurs, and ‘all sorts of people’. Although foreigners as such were
not mentioned, Bukharans were no doubt included among the would-be slave
exporters. And they would lose a profitable opportunity for trade, since all slaves,
whether Siberian, Russian or others, were to be confiscated and sent back to

Tobol'sk.§2
Worse, however, was to come, for in the aftermath of the Nerchinsk commercial
and peace agreement between Muscovy and China of 1689, Peter the Great would try
to monopolize, or at least firmly control, the profitable Chinese trade. He would also
attempt to increase the State revenue by gradually eroding the privileges of both
visiting and local Bukharans. In 1691 he instructed the voevoda of Irkutsk to prevent
merchants from going to China through his territory. Only those who carried a permit
from the Tsar, together with a letter from the Siberian Department, should be allowed
through, and only after their numbers and goods had been checked, and they had
paid the appropriate dues. That same year Bukharan traders were ordered in Tobol'sk
to barter the Tsar's goods for Chinese goods, but they declared themselves unable to

do so, there having ‘been no trade at Lake Yamysh that year’.®> About a year later,
and before the departure to China of his envoy, Ysbrandt Ides, Peter the Great
removed a new type of fur from the open market, this being the pelt of the fine grey
squirrel found near Tyumen’, whose skin was turned into very strong (and valuable)
leather.64 Then in September 1693 he sharply increased the trade taxes payable by
Bukharan visitors, bringing them into line with those paid by his subjects.
Every contingency seems to have been covered in the comprehensive set of
instructions which he addressed to all the Siberian Customs officials. The fee for
storing goods in government warehouses was increased to 18 den'gi per week or 72

61 4 7., V, 334. P.S.Z., II, 130-41. Chimitdorzhiev, "K istorii". Rumyantsev, 357.

62 p.S.Z., Ill, 140.
63 A.1., V, 372. D.A.L, X, 369.
64 Ides, 10.

Trade with Siberia

den'gi per four weeks instead of 50 den'gi, as earlier, Desyataya of 20 den'gi
per
rouble was to be paid on coins brought in for the purchase of Siberian goods. It
was
also demanded, at the time of sale, and in kind, on all goods imported from
Muscovy, irrespective of whether desyataya had already been paid on these goods
in
Muscovy. Similarly, desyataya would be charged on the sale price of a horse, but
purchasers of livestock were favoured, as only a nominal amount of 6 den'gi per
horse and 12 den'gi per head of cattle would be asked from them.
On goods imported from China and Bukhara, such as gold, silver, damask, satin
and kitaika, Bukharans no longer benefited from the low rate of import and sales
taxes which had applied since 1622. Customs officials would now charge them
double the previous amount, or one in ten (desyataya) instead of one in twenty
(dvadtsataya), both at the frontier and at the time of sale. The new rule, which
applied to all importers, would certainly have come as a shock to the Bukharans.
Peter the Great therefore tried to mitigate the effect of this massive increase by
stressing that these payments were to be made in kind (as before), and not in money,
unless the numbers of articles imported were not easily divisible by ten, when money
would have to be paid. A major concession followed, which clearly showed a desire
to conciliate Bukharan merchants, for the Tsar declared that newcomers from
Bukhara would be assessed at the old rate on their first visit. The new rate would
only apply from their second visit, and only if they stated at the time that they
intended to come over regularly. This concession provided Bukharan merchants with
a loophole which might enable them to avoid paying the new rate altogether, for a
trader with sufficient connections could continue to pay the old rate, provided that he

sent a different agent to Siberia with each caravan.6
Other clauses in the same instructions related to the import of precious stones and
the export of Russian and Siberian goods, and merchants were warned that failure to
declare their goods and attempting to sell them outside the confines of the gostinyi
dvor would be punishable by confiscation. Realising that the ‘one in ten’ rule would
be impossible to apply, in kind, to precious stones which were imported from China
and Bukhara, and that an expert valuation was essential to determine the tax if
payable in money, Peter the Great instructed the Siberian officials to waive the tax.
The rubies, pearls and sapphires in question, however, should be listed carefully in
the transit passes to be sent with the merchants to the Siberian Department, where the
import tax would be assessed and taken.
With regard to the Russian and Siberian goods purchased for export by
Bukharans and other foreigners, two vastly different rates were to apply. The new
rate of 20 den'gi per rouble (desyataya) would be charged on purchases of Russian
goods which they were taking back to their own land. But on the Siberian goods
which they exported to China they would have to pay the purchase dues, plus an
additional 6 den'gi per rouble at the frontier, as did their Muscovite competitorss.
Finally Peter the Great addressed the problem of the zapovednye tovary.
Although he did not prohibit the export of silver and gold in so many words, as his
predecessors had done, he effectively discouraged the practice by forbidding his
subjects to use either silver or gold when paying for foreign goods. He reinforced
earlier prohibitions on the sale or barter of all types of guns, lead or gunpowder to

65 P.S.Z., Ill, 161, clause 3. Ogloblin, "Obozrenie", II, 24.
66 p.§.Z., Ill, 162, 161, 163, clauses 7, 1, 5, 13.

523

Bukharan trade

foreigners, and on the export of valuable sable and fox pelts, but he also offered a
small concession to Bukharans by repealing the Regent's prohibition of 1686
concerning sables. Once again merchants would be permitted to acquire cheap sables
with a view to exporting them to China, provided that they were worth no more than

20 to 40 roubles per bundle of 40.°7
The concessions introduced in the measures of 1693 paid off. Just as Peter the
Great had hoped, the new regulations resulted in an increase of revenue for his

Treasury without discouraging Bukharans from trading in Siberia.
Meanwhile rhubarb remained a state monopoly, which could only be sold to the
authorities or to their agent. The stocks accumulated by Tsar Aleksei appeared to
have become depleted for in August 1691 the Tsars Ivan and Peter appointed a
member of the gostinnaya sotnya, Ivan Isaev, to purchase rhubarb for them. He was
told to buy ‘up to 50 pud or as much as he want(ed)’. He could pay as much or as
little as he wished for his supplies and he was given five years in which to seek out
the valuable root ‘in Siberia or wherever it is found’. When the rhubarb was
delivered to the Siberian Department in Moscow he would receive 20 efimki (10
roubles if the rate of exchange established by Tsar Aleksei still applied) for each pud
delivered. All the rhubarb which Isaev and his men might find, buy, or confiscate
was to be declared, the penalty for non-declaration being death. Before the rhubarb
containers were sent to Muscovy they were to be checked and sealed by local
officials, first in Tobol'sk and then in Verkhotur'e. The rhubarb was then to be sent
on with no further examination or delay, and without requiring the payment of either
transport tax or sale tax. All this was carefully explained in a circular letter sent to all
voevody and officials, and in case they failed to understand that Isaev had been
granted an exclusive monopoly, the Tsars stressed that none but Isaev was allowed
to trade in rhubarb or to send rhubarb from Siberia to Moscow, and that rhubarb was
not to be freely available in the market.
In the event, however, Isaev was relieved of his monopoly a year earlier than
expected. Whether he had not been sufficiently successful in his endeavours, or
whether he was thought to have abused his privileges is a matter for conjecture,
although the latter explanation seems more likely. In any case the rhubarb monopoly
was taken out of his hands and farmed out instead to a merchant from Hamburg
called Matvei Poppe, in late May 1695. Whether or not Poppe paid more than Isaev
for the privilege is not known, but he probably paid for it in valuable foreign coins
and this in itself would have made the arrangement more advantageous to the
Treasury . As in the case of Isaev, Poppe's monopoly was to last five years. He too
received the sole right to purchase all the rhubarb available in Tomsk, Tobol'sk,
Tara, Yamysh ‘and other (places)’ at any price, but far stricter controls were
imposed. Thus, unlike Isaev, Poppe was expected to declare the price paid for his

supplies before the rhubarb left Tobol'sk. The quantities he took to Moscow had to
be entered on his transit pass, and he was not told in advance the rate that would be
paid by the ministry in Moscow. He was further limited in his freedom of action
because he had to employ as buyers only Russians and Siberians, and no Germans.
On the other hand it would appear that he was permitted to export a certain amount of
rhubarb, provided that he declared it first and paid the correct dues to the state. The
rhubarb and the income accruing from the deal with Poppe, however, soon proved
67 p.S.Z., Ill, 164-5, clauses 20, 16, 15, 18.

524

Trade with Siberia

insufficient, and although Poppe does not seem to have lost his monopoly as a result,
in December

1696, or only 18 months later, Peter the Great tried to increase his

supplies by ordering a search for the kopytchatyi variety in the Nerchinsk area.°8

The same month, when he was making preparations for the Grand Embassy
which was to begin in March 1697 and which would take him to many of the
European capitals, including London, for 17 months, Peter the Great decided to
permit the sale of tobacco on the open market. He needed money to finance the trip
and to convince his fellow-monarchs of his power and influence, so that they would
agree to join him in a coalition against Turkey.? Funds would also be required in
order to purchase equipment for his army and navy, and to send back to Russia the
craftsmen whom he was hoping to recruit. However, permitting tobacco to be sold
openly in the country was a major innovation, a total change of policy in relation to a
product which had been banned for over 60 years. It therefore had to be introduced
gradually and carefully regulated. This was achieved by farming out the tobacco trade
to Martin Bogdanov, a member of the gostinnaya sotnya, for one year from 1
December 1696 and by keeping a strict control on his activities. Bogdanov began by
buying up and selling all the tobacco that he could find in Muscovy and nearly five
months later he was sent to carry out a similar task in Siberia. At this stage a rather
revealing letter was sent to the local voevoda of the town of Yeniseisk in which the
Tsar gave full details of Bogdanov's brief and also took the trouble, most unusually,
to explain why he had thought it necessary to legalise the trade and the use of tobacco

in his dominions.
The decision was taken, the Tsar explained, because tobacco was in any case
being sold secretly ‘in many houses’ without paying dues, a practical argument
which was clearly thought to have a better chance of convincing the voevoda than an
assertion that smoking was, after all, not ‘hated by God’. The fact was that Peter the
Great himself liked smoking and saw no reason therefore to uphold the previous
prohibitions, but this was not likely to go down well with his more old-fashioned
subjects.
Bogdanov should be allowed to buy and sell tobacco freely, voevoda Bogdan
Glebov was told. No restrictions were placed on the quantities which he could buy or
sell, nor on the price which he might ask, but he had to sell ‘as cheaply as possible’
while also ensuring that the maximum profit was made for the Treasury and that
nothing was left unsold. Quite a tall order for any merchant, but he was only
appointed for one year and it was made clear that his difficult task would then be
undertaken by a team of sworn Customs officials and supervisors.
Confident that the voevoda would let him know if Bogdanov failed to get the best
possible price for his tobacco, the Tsar then told him that the profits should be left in
the agent's hands. This being contrary to all precedent, for the profit from all official
transactions was normally paid to the voevoda for transmission to the Treasury, it
was thought necessary to repeat the instructions. And in case the voevoda might have

doubts about the wisdom of this course of action it was explained that the money
would be used by Bogdanov to have a special warehouse built in which tobacco
would be stored and sold freely to all. The explanation was repeated later on, no
doubt in order to ensure that Bogdanov had no difficulties with the voevoda, after
68 Tymanskii, II, 71-74. A.L, V, 444, 468.
69 Grey, 100-8.

525

Bukharan trade

applied to Bogdanov's
which the voevoda was briefed upon the rate of taxation to be
20 den'gi per lb on
sales: This was to be 10 den'gi per lb on Circassian tobacco,
Nothing was said,
tobacco.
Swedish tobacco and 30 deng'i per lb on Virginian
, Bukharan or
Chinese
the
sold
he
however, about the rate that would apply when
because it was
perhaps
Siberia,
in
e
purchas
locally grown tobacco which he might
popular. The
more
be
would
s
varietie
foreign
and
thought that the Circassian
ordered to
merely
was
He
matter.
the
in
on
discreti
much
voevoda was not allowed
brought
tobacco
provide suitable assistants for Bogdanov, to check all the supplies of
Both
tobacco.
of
storage
into the town and to prevent the illicit trading in and secret
past,
the
in
than
severe
less
be
would, of course, be punished, but the penalty would
in
as
fine,
a
to
limited
be
would
it
and
ent
for it would not involve corporal punishm

the case of wine, mead and beer.7°

in
The methods which Bogdanov employed in order to discharge his mission

of action
Siberia, however, were soon found to be unsatisfactory and his freedom

of
had to be curtailed. Serious losses had been sustained by the Treasury as a result
even
and
,
continued
had
trade
tobacco
illicit
his activities, and also because the
increased. The fact was that native Siberians were very partial to tobacco and they
were prepared to acquire it in exchange for furs. Bogdanov took advantage of this
fact, and so did the serving-men and officials Who were sent to the uluses on official
business and who, unlike him, were not authorised to deal in tobacco. As a result
there was a significant fall in the quantity of furs delivered as yasak to the Treasury.
The sales tax which ought to have paid on the tobacco sales was also lost, for there
were no Customs posts in the uluses to collect the tax and, unlike Bogdanov, the
officials and serving-men did not declare their sales on returning to the Siberian
towns.

The problem was so serious that two months after the voevoda of Yeniseisk had
been sent his instructions, additional directives were sent to the Siberian Department
about the matter. These directives, which came from the Preobrazhenskii
Department, were as follows. Although Bogdanov and his helpers were allowed to
sell tobacco in return for money, they were definitely not allowed to take any to the
yasak-payers' uluses, nor to barter it for sables, because sables could only be
purchased by the Treasury. The prohibition of barter was also to apply in the case of
ordinary furs, because the government yasak collection had greatly decreased. In any
case Bogdanov's brief was only to sell tobacco in the towns, and he was not to go to
the uluses or to send anyone there to get furs. Having thus ensured that Bogdanov
could not take advantage of his privileged position to the detriment of the Treasury, it
was made clear that offenders would be treated with the greatest harshness, as in the

past. Petty officials and soldiers sent to the natives' uluses were strictly forbidden to
sell them tobacco on pain of death. This ruling was to be circulated to all the
collectors of yasak so that they could take appropriate steps if faced with offenders.
They were told to confiscate the possessions of anyone caught taking tobacco to the
uluses. The offender was then to be kept under guard until further instructions were
sent from Moscow. As for Bogdanov and his helpers, on leaving Siberia for
Moscow they were required to declare exactly how much money they had obtained
for the tobacco sold and in which town. They were strictly forbidden to take sables,
other furs, rhubarb, musk or castoreum to Muscovy and if any such item was found

70 Tumanskii, II, 92-96. Mezhov, Sibirskaya bibliografiya, no.1417.

526

Trade with Siberia

on them it was to be confiscated.7!
Although Bukharans would of course have been affected by the regulation
s
referring to the tobacco trade and to the purchase of furs in the uluses, there
were
other regulations issued in 1697 which concerned them more directly. Thus in March
1697 the voevoda of Nerchinsk was reminded that the new import rate chargeable on
Bukharan, Chinese and Mongol goods was the desyataya or 10 per cent, and there
was no suggestion that a lower rate was applicable, as before, to newcomers.72 Then
in September Peter the Great tightened the rules applying to Bukharan traders.
In the regulations sent to the voevoda of Verkhotur'e on 12 September 1697,73
he tried to reduce the scope of their activities and also to close the loophole left in
1693 which enabled Bukharans to pay the older, and lower, rate of tax on importing
goods and also at the time of sale, simply by sending new agents with their goods to
Siberia every year. He did so by adopting the very same words as were used by his
father in a letter to the Tobol'sk voevoda of 1664 and by making it clear that
Bukharans who came in future to Verkhotur'e from the khanate were expected to
trade for themselves alone (and not for others) in the gostinyi dvor. In case they
should try and deal through local agents, he added that none but visiting Bukharans
should be permitted to trade in Bukharan goods. He also stressed that the money
accruing from their sales must be used for purchasing ‘Russian’ goods and that they
were strictly forbidden to take ‘Russian or gold’ coins out of the country, an
indication that Tsar Aleksei's ruling of 1664 against the export of cash was being
ignored.
In a letter to the new voevoeda of Tobol'sk written the same day, Peter repeated
and confirmed the rulings issued by his father in 1664 with regard to furs and to the
disposal of unsold goods, which seems to indicate either that such rulings had not

been properly enforced, or else that they had lapsed.74 The voevoda, Count Petr
Mikhailovich Cherkasskii, was instructed not to permit any merchant who had

recently arrived from Muscovy to trade in furs before the yasak had been collected,
for there was a danger that he might acquire the best furs, leaving the worst ones for
the Treasury. Only after the tribute had been paid could merchants ‘trade freely’ in
permitted furs, and then only within the confines of the gostinyi dvor. All trade in
villages, yurts or volosti, i.e. outside the major centres which were provided with
Customs posts, was strictly forbidden. And although merchants were allowed to take
unsold goods to other Siberian towns, they could only do so after the items in
question had been duly examined, listed and assessed for ot'ezzhaya.75
The directives that followed were explicit and harsh. They showed the Tsar's
firm resolve to stamp out abuses, coupled with a determination to get the maximum
return for the Treasury from the activities of traders. First he decreed that merchants
caught trading outside the gostinyi dvor should have their goods confiscated and be
thrown into prison for a week, adding mysteriously, and ominously, that they would
also be ‘punished’. Secondly, he instructed Cherkasskii-to demand payment in
money and not in kind from merchants coming to Siberia from Muscovy, a ruling

71 PS.Z., II, 329.
72 Grey, 100-8. A./., V, 473.
73 Not in 1698 as erroneously stated by Ziyaev, in Ekonomicheskie svyazi, 58.

74 P.S.Z,, Ill, 395.
75 P.S.Z., Ill, 357. The scale of ot'ezzhaya applicable is not stated.

527

Bukharan trade

which was bound to affect those Bukharans who chose the route across the Urals
into Siberia. Thirdly, he decreed that all goods from China should be stamped on
entry into Siberia so that sales dues would not be evaded. This view of the
merchants’ honesty was quickly toned down, however, for although determined to
enforce the law, the Tsar was equally determined that traders should not be
discouraged from plying their trade. Cherkasskii was told therefore that he must
neither ill-treat nor harass merchants.
The letter ended with another mention of the main product of Siberia, namely
furs, this time with reference to the traders of the khanate. “Whatever Bukharans
might come henceforth to Siberia, Tobol'sk and other towns to sell their goods’, the
voevoda was told, they ‘must under no circumstance whatsoever be sold sables,
beavers, foxes, or any type of good furs to take back to Bukhara and other’ foreign
parts. This general prohibition was bound to affect Bukharan traders adversely, but if
the edict meant that the export of cheap sables to China was no longer permitted, then
the profitability of their Chinese trade would be greatly reduced, no doubt for the
benefit of Peter the Great's official traders.
However, despite the explicitness of these instructions it seems that they were not
properly enforced, for it was found necessary to clarify and expand them three
months later. On 11 December 1697 the Tsar wrote to all the Siberian officials,
referring to his earlier instructions and stressing that the purchase of black fox and all
types of sables was strictly forbidden, regardless of whether they were intended for

sale in Siberia or in Muscovy.”6
This ruling came shortly after Martin Bogdanov's tobacco monopoly was
renewed for a further year from 1 December 1697, the merchant having presumably
satisfied the Tsar and the Treasury with his tobacco sales during his first year of
tenure. Bogdanov's second year, however, was not trouble free. A major
landowner, Grigorii Dmitrievich Stroganov, also appointed on 1 December to
supervise the sale of tobacco on private estates and monastery lands, complained that
Bogdanov, who was to collect all the tobacco money, was encroaching upon him and
selling on the territory allotted to him. The Tsar agreed with Stroganov and carefully
re-defined Bogdanov's instructions on 11 (22) December

1697 and also on 11

January 1698, as applying only to towns and villages, and not to monasteries or
estates, but the dispute continued and during February further accusations were made
against Bogdanov. Stroganov was certainly determined to protect, and if possible

increase, his valuable tobacco concession.”7
A few months later a major enquiry into the origins and privileges of Siberian
Bukharans was started, Peter the Great having realised that they were paying neither
the tithe, nor the obrok, and decided that they should be made to contribute more

fully to the ever-growing needs of his Treasury. In April 1698 he wrote to the
voevoda of Tobol'sk asking him to find out how long they had been living in
Siberia, where they came from, in what year, and what was the nature of their
landholdings.78 Following his investigation Cherkasskii was to have them assessed
for the obrok on their trading activities and the value of their stock at the rate paid by
76 Ibid., 357-8, 405.
77 Tbid., 411, 438-41.
78 Tn fact, as mentioned earlier, they had paid obrok on their shops in Tobol'sk as early as 1632-4.
TsGADA, fond 214, op.1, kn.81, listy 36, 49.

528

Trade with Siberia

‘good’ (substantial?) posadskie lyudi. They were also to pay
vydel'nyi khleb on their
crops at the rate which applied to their Russian fellow-citizens,
and obrok on their
hay fields on a sliding scale of 2 to 5 roubles per field to
be determined by the
voevoda, taking into account the size of their property and its value.
Fully aware that
the Bukharans would object to the new taxes, he explained at
length why he had
decided to introduce them. Siberian Bukharans had lived for a long time
in Muscovite
Siberia, with full permission to trade and own land, unmolested in
the exercise of
their faith and benefiting from privileges. It was high time for them to
be brought into
line with his other subjects, all of whom gave service to the authorit
ies and paid
obrok. Peter the Great pointed out that even after the projected reform Bukhara
ns
would still benefit from greater freedom and less numerous taxes. And he conclud
ed
by stressing that he was only acting in accordance with common practice in Muslim
countries where foreigners were never permitted to live, own land or trade without

paying dues.79

This measure was so unpopular with Siberian Bukharans, and with the voevoda
who had to enforce it, that it took some time to implement. Before it could even
begin to work, Peter the Great granted the monopoly for the import and sale of
tobacco in Muscovy and Siberia to an Englishman, the Marquess of Carmarthen,
from whom he received £12,000. Lord Carmarthen's monopoly was to run for one
year as from the beginning of September 1698, i.e. four months before Bogdanov's
monopoly was due to expire, the opportunity of acquiring such a large amount of
money having no doubt helped to persuade the Tsar that his agreement with
Bogdanov and Stroganov could be superseded at short notice. Hasty preparations
were made to try and ensure a smooth transition between Bogdanov and Lord
Carmarthen, a letter being sent to the Yeniseisk voevoda, Bogdan Glebov, on 6
August, or less than a month before the change over. Glebov was informed of the
monopoly and forbidden to collect the special tobacco tax, or to tax the new
monopolist and his agents either on their sales of tobacco, or on any purchases which
they might make with the proceeds of sale during the year in question. Carmarthen
and his agents were required to engage Russians to help them in their task, but they
should not have to face any further demands. No one else, except for the Tsar's
Circassian subjects whose trade was insignificant and purely local, would be
permitted to sell tobacco, pipes and all the perquisites appertaining to smoking
throughout Muscovy and Siberia. Purchasers of Carmarthen's tobacco would be
particularly favoured, for they would receive permission to smoke it freely, ignoring
all previous prohibitions and (outdated) customs. Only the new monopolist and his
agents should be permitted to sow and grow tobacco in the area. All other tobacco
plantations would be destroyed. The voevoda should make all this known far and
wide. Finally he was told to provide Carmarthen's men with all the officials they
might need in order to check local tobacco plantations, to prevent and confiscate

unauthorized imports, and to fine defaulters.8°
There were at least two reasons for Peter the Great's decision to look abroad for
someone to administer this valuable trade. First, as mentioned earlier, he needed the
extra money for the salaries of the foreign personnel whom he had recruited to take
back to Muscovy. Secondly, Lord Carmarthen was a man whom he admired as being

79 P.S.Z., Il, 446-7.
80 Tumanskii, II, 106-9. Mezhov, Sibirskiya bibliografiya, no.1468.
529

Bukharan trade

‘wild, brave, a sturdy drinker, an enthusiastic sailor and a ship's designer’. A third
reason might have been Lord Carmarthen's purported promise to keep the Russian
Court supplied with 1,000 leaves of the best tobacco every year.®!
The money received from Lord Carmarthen was useful as a stopgap, but Peter
the Great soon realised that he needed a more regular supply of ready cash, and in
order to obtain this he took major steps to encourage and develop trade for the greater
benefit of his Treasury. In November 1698 he issued a new set of comprehensive
instructions to ‘all officials of Siberia and the Northern towns’ in which an attempt
was made to standardize the rates of Customs and trade taxes applicable to all traders,
trappers and producers of goods in Siberia, whether Muscovites, Siberian natives or
foreigners. The general idea was that they should be fairer, enabling traders to make
a profit without reducing the total takings of the government, and the guiding
principle was that no more than 20 den'gi per rouble should be paid on any item.
Thus a small ‘entrepreneur’ who had already paid a sort of “VAT” of 20 den'gi on the
furs obtained by trapping would not have to pay.again on selling these furs. On
imported goods the tax would be charged at the frontier, for it would be lost if items
were sold by barter, ‘secretly and far away’, or if they were sold two to three years
after entry, when ‘checking the books and seeing if tax had (already been) paid’
would prove too difficult.
*
One section of these instructions related specifically to the rates payable by the
traders who came over in the suite of Qalmaq and Mongol ambassadors, starting with
‘those calling themselves Bukharans of their Taishas’, i.e., the Bukharan agents of
Qalmaq chiefs. They were to be taxed at the same rate as non-official traders on their
sales, ie. at 20 den'gi per rouble, for it was known that in the past they had taken
advantage of their official status in order to make a personal profit. When they
finished trading and prepared to leave the country, export dues on their purchases
would also be charged at the rate which applied to others, and they would be
expected to pay in coins. Having thus made clear that such ‘protected Bukharans’
would no longer receive preferential treatment, the Tsar added, in a more conciliatory
vein, that if they had no ready money, they would be permitted to pay in kind and at
the old rate. And just in case this was taken as denoting lack of purpose or weakness
he hastened to explain that the concession was only introduced in order to prevent
them, as well as the Qalmaq whom they represented, from becoming embittered
against him. The fact was that he did not want them to stop trading in Siberia. He
went on to warn Officials, therefore, neither to charge these Bukharan agents at
excessive rates on their transactions. They were not to harass them, nor even to
accept gifts (bribes?) from them, but protect them, help them and show them every
kindness. In the case of bona fide diplomatic envoys, such as Bukharans who
represented the kuntaidzhi and other Qalmaq Princes, he added, their goods would
continue to be exempted from all dues, although they would have to be inspected and
listed by Customs officials.®2
Peter the Great then gave detailed instructions as to the goods which were not
available to traders in Siberia. He reminded officials that expensive black fox and all
types of sables were zapovednye tovary which could only be sold to the Treasury.
Anyone caught trying to sell full pelts, or even parts of pelts, surreptitiously, was to
81 Grey, 119. Foust, Muscovite and Mandarin, 196.

82 P S.Z..10, 509.
530

Trade with Siberia

have his stock confiscated without compensation. Similar rules would henceforth
apply to the rhubarb and tobacco imported by the Bukharan agents of the Qalmaq
Princes. Any failure to declare, or any attempt on their part to sell such goods
secretly, would be punished with confiscation. Declared items, on the other hand,
would be purchased by the Treasury at 12 to 14 den'gi per lb of Chinese ball-tobacco
and 4 to 6 roubles per pud (16.8 kg) of rhubarb. Clearly it was hoped to make the
maximum profit on such items, for Treasury officials were instructed to sell or barter
the ball-tobacco later ‘at the highest price’, and the estimated market price of rhubarb
was far higher, at 10 to 18 roubles, than the rate at which it would be acquired for the
Tsar. Still on the subject of zapovednye tovary, earlier prohibitions concerning the
export of gold, silver, lead and guns, were renewed or extended, and cannons,
bullets, fuses, harquebusses and rifles were added to the list.
Finally, it was made clear that the Tsar intended to restrict the Chinese trade and,
if possible, to reserve it for himself. He declared that in future the frontier post at
Nerchinsk would be closed to all foreigners, except for those who produced two
separate permissions, one from himself and one from the Siberian Department, as
had been required in Irkutsk since 1691. He added that caravans should not be
permitted to go to China every year, for they might flood the market with goods and

thus reduce the margin of profit for all traders.83
This lengthy document should have left Siberian officials in no doubt that Peter
the Great would expect trade regulations to be properly applied and enforced in the
province. However, voevodal supervision remained lax and many abuses continued
to be tolerated, both in Siberia proper and at Yamysh. Several more letters therefore
had to be sent off in 1699 in order to ensure that all officials knew the Tsar's views
and that they acted in accordance with them. In January 1699 Peter wrote to the
voevoda of Tara. His letter was in many ways a copy of the letter of September 1697
addressed to the Tobol'sk voevoda, which seems to indicate that, although the two
towns were not far from each other, and although Tara was officially subordinate to
Tobol'sk, no effort had been made to pass on his earlier instructions. In his letter the
Tsar declared that no transactions should take place before the yasak was collected.
He reminded the voevoda that merchants must only trade within the gostinyi dvor,
that the relevant dues must be paid before a sale could take place, and that ot'ezzhaya
should always be demanded from merchants removing unsold goods from the town.
He also thought it necessary to point out that a one-tenth tax was to be collected on all
types of fur and he declared that anyone who tried to sell in the countryside, i.e.,
outside the confines of the gostinyi dvor, would be whipped.®4
In March 1699, presumably because the Tobol'sk voevoda was dragging his feet
over the issue of imposing new taxes on Siberian Bukharans, a special envoy, Ivan
Kochanov, was sent from Moscow to conduct a survey of their landholdings. And
Cherkasskii was told that when the survey was completed he should make use of its
results in order to assess local Bukharans. The Tsar having changed his mind, they
were no longer required to pay the tithe on their crops and the obrok on their hay
fields. Instead the voevoda was to charge them the obrok in money on both at the rate
of 40 den'gi per desyatina (2.7 acres) under rye, 20 den'gi per desyatina of spring
crops and 1 den'ga per haystack. Although this meant that Siberian Bukharans had
83 Thid., 491-509.
84 Thid., 554-5.

$31

Bukharan trade

amount payable was far less
lost their earlier exemptions from agricultural taxes, the
they had originally been
that
ts
paymen
obrok
and
khleb
than the combined vydel'nyi
y Muscovite citizens were
threatened with, for, according to Shunkov, ordinar
his need for money,
charged on average 54 to 60 den’gi per desyatina. Thus, despite
retain a privileged
ans
Bukhar
n
Peter the Great was still prepared to let the Siberia
State as traders,
the
to
ess
usefuln
their
of
ration
position among taxpayers. In conside
s and Chinese,
Mongol
,
Qirghiz
,
Qalmagq
the
to
envoys
serving-men and multilingual
rds of the tax revenue
he was ready to lose one-third, and in some cases two-thi
This was not as
which ought to have accrued to the Treasury from their land.
only owned a
they
v
Shunko
to
generous as it might appear, however, for according
ed from this
collect
been
have
could
that
total of 328 desyatiny and the maximum
um loss
maxim
the
crop,
only
their
was
rye
if
,
that
would have been 98.4 roubles, so
.85
roubles
33
to
32
of
order
the
of
been
to the Treasury would have
While Kochanov was conducting his survey Peter the Great turned to the trading
in a
activities of visiting Bukharans at Lake Yamysh and dealt with them at length
in
v),
Theophilo
(Theodor
letter addressed to the voevoda of Tobol'sk, Fedor Feofilov
at
caused
been
had
which
es
difficulti
June 1699.86 He began by mentioning all the
the
and
Bashkirs
the
Qalmaq,
the
of
attitude
hostile
Yamysh in the recent past by the
Qazaqs. He went on to recall all the regulations relating to zapovednye tovary which
had been issued in the previous 19 years, and made it clear that these regulations
applied in Yamysh, just as they did in the rest of Siberia. He then extended the list of
forbidden goods with a military connotation by adding suits of armour, coats of mail,
helmets, sabres, bear-spears, axes, knives, bows and arrows, and also all items

made of iron. In order to make it clear that he attached great importance to these items
he referred to them three times consecutively in his letter, stressing that none should

be sold to Qalmaq or Bukharan visitors, none should be taken back by official

envoys and none should be delivered to the Qalmaq encampments or to the khanate
by Muscovites. With regard to furs, he mentioned black and dark brown foxes,
together with black sables as the type of forbidden goods which should not be sold to
the Qalmaq, but said nothing about the cheaper sable pelts or about incomplete pelts,
which implied that the voevoda could turn a blind eye to the sale of such articles in
Yamysh.
Peter the Great then tightened the restrictions applicable to rhubarb and tobacco,
and added a new prohibition which concerned slaves. In the case of rhubarb, he

ruled that its sale ‘by anyone’ was forbidden. Feofilov was instructed to pack off to
Moscow, with his merchandise, any merchant who tried to sell the precious root at
Yamysh. As for tobacco, he urged the voevoda to confiscate any which Russian
nationals might have acquired by barter from either Qalmaq or Bukharan merchants,
explaining that he did not want his subjects to smuggle tobacco into Tobol'sk,
whether they intended to sell it or to ‘cook’ it there. The voevoda may have believed
that Peter's directives were due to religious reasons, but it is more likely that the Tsar
simply wanted to honour the agreement reached with Lord Carmarthen which still
had a few months to run. He added therefore that smuggled tobacco would be
confiscated and publicly burnt, and that the smuggler would be suitably punished.
85 Tbid., IV, 168-9. Shunkoy, Ocherki po istorii zemledelya, 52, 54.
86 Feofilov followed Cherkasskii as voevoda and this appears to have been his letter of
appointment, although, if Barsukov is right, he did not begin his task until 5 months later.

552

Trade with Siberia

Turning next to the subject of slaves he ordered Feofilov to seize all those
whom
Muscovite traders might have acquired at Yamysh. This must have created a problem
for Muscovites living in Siberia, for since 1649 they had been permitted
to buy
certain types of slaves. Even as recently as 1697 the purchase of Qalmagq slaves had
been permitted, and also the purchase of any Siberian natives who did not pay yasak
to the Tsar, but the instructions given to Feofilov meant that this was no longer the
case, and there was no suggestion that the merchants in question would be
compensated. Bukharan and Qalmaq merchants must have been particularly
disappointed to hear that they could no longer count on supplying Muscovites with
slaves in exchange for furs. However, as Peter the Great did not want them to stop
coming to Yamysh, he tried to ensure that they were treated with great fairness and,
if possible, even better than previously. He therefore demanded that the correct level
of dues be charged on their transactions and declared that he would tolerate neither
favouritism, nor unfair practices. To make doubly sure about this Feofilov was told
that whenever Bukharans and other foreigners were assessed they must be provided
with an interpreter whose task would be to explain exactly what was required of

them.87

Peter the Great's attitude towards the Bukharans and other foreigners trading at
Yamysh was typical of his increasing belief that trade was to be encouraged, because
it generated wealth and increased his own revenue. After returning from Europe and
dealing with the streltsy rebellions, he had determined to build a modern fleet, an
expensive undertaking for which yet more money had to be raised. This he proposed
to do by multiplying the number of taxes and also by persuading his merchants to
conduct large-scale commercial operations, both within the country and abroad. In
order to show his goodwill and to give them some incentive he freed them from the
supervision of the voevody, allowing them to collect certain taxes themselves and to
have some say in local affairs. He also wrote to every one of the newly-appointed
burmistry (burgomasters) and to all the voevody of Muscovy and Siberia in October
1699, strictly forbidding Customs officials to ‘cause any delays, problems or losses
to Russians or foreigners’ and explaining that because trade was so valuable, he

expected them to give merchants every encouragement.%8
His positive attitude towards commerce did not, however, extend to tobacco. A
month later he sent a strict warning to the soldiers of four of his regiments,
threatening those who might trade in wine or tobacco with whipping and with

lifelong exile for themselves and their families, either in Siberia or in the Caucasus.89
The following year, in pursuance of his campaign to increase the volume of
trade, Peter the Great made an effort to attract visiting Bukharans to Siberia, their

activities having presumably diminished since the doubling of their sales tax liability
and since the prohibition of indirect trade through agents. In April 1700 he sent a
detachment of soldiers to punish the Qazaqs for having attacked and robbed a
Bukharan party near Tomsk in 1699. And once the expedition had achieved its
objectives, he despatched a messenger to the khanate to announce that the coast was
clear. This friendly overture contrasted sharply with his suspicion of the general
behaviour of Bukharan traders, and with his determination to oust them altogether

87 4.I., V, 520, 525-7. Vilkov, "Tobol'skie tamozhennye knigi", 18.
88 Grey, 137, 139-46 and ff. P.S.Z., II, 648.
89 Thid., 667.

Bukharan trade

from the lucrative Chinese trade. Thus, when he gave orders in late June 1700 for the
rebuilding of Tobol'sk after the latest fire, he gave specific instrutions for the new
buildings to be made in stone rather than wood, in order that his inhabitants and their
property might be safe in the furture, and that they should remain able to pay their
taxes. Stone and bricks were to be provided cheaply for this purpose, but no such
rule applied to the new houses of the resident Tatars and Bukharans. They could be
made of wood or stone, at the voevoda's discretion, the only proviso being that they
should be situated in a special district which would be near the town, but not too
close to the Russian quarters.
Two reasons were given for this decision to separate the Muslims from the other
residents. The first was that their mosques were (at the time, and unsuitably) placed
next to churches. And the second was that when ‘visitors and trading Bukharans
come over from the steppes, they stay with them and that causes us great losses in
trade dues’. Why this was so was not explained, but it was thought that if visitors
stayed in private houses, rather than in the gostinyi dvor provided in the town, they
managed to avoid paying trade dues, quite apart from the accommodation and
warehousing fees.9°
That same year Peter the Great made a new attempt to protect his commercial
links with China from competitors such as the Bukharans. He began by adding the
pelts of grey-chested foxes to the list of goods which they were not allowed to buy.
The new prohibition was introduced in two slightly different letters written in late
June and early July 1700 and addressed to the voevody of all the Siberian towns
from Tobol'sk to Yakutsk. Visiting Bukharans, Qalmaq and others were to be
forbidden to purchase black, plain-chested or grey-chested foxes, sable pelts or sable
pieces. The Tsar explained that the new prohibition was necessary in order to protect
his own trade with China, for merchants could easily ruin it (by flooding China with
such goods). The merchants' activities were also said to be harming the yasak
collection. It had become known that in the past the yasak-payers had secretly sold
their furs to Qalmaq and Bukharan merchants who had taken them to China or even
to Muscovy, thus leaving only a reduced number of pelts for the yasak-collectors. In
order to prevent such a shortfall the voevody were ordered to keep a careful watch on
the yasak-payers, the yasak-collectors and all the officials sent to Siberia. Bukharans
and others were to be stopped from taking any furs which they might purchase even
‘to the steppes’, for they would go on from there to China and ruin the China

trade.?!
A few months later, probably because the illegal purchase and smoking of
tobacco had continued despite the prohibitions of 1697 and 1699, the Tsar decided to
explore the possibility of allowing the monopoly-holder and his agents to sell

Chinese ball-tobacco in addition to ‘their own German tobacco called nekotian
(nicotin!)’ in Siberia.92 The agents themselves had asked for this extension to their
privilege which would involve buying ball-tobacco from ‘Bukharans and other
foreigners’ in order to barter it later (presumably against furs) with the yasak-payers.
90 Ziyaev, Ekonomicheskie svyazi, 70. Pamyatniki Sibirskoi istorii, 1, 67-68.

91 P.S.Z., IV, 60. TSGADA, fond 1121, op. I f, no. 505, list 14.
92 It is not clear who the monopoly-holder was at the time. The Tsar simply says that ‘foreigners’
enquired about this extension to their monopoly. The next monopoly-holder known so far was
Karlus Gutfel (Charles Goodfell?) who lost his privilege in April 1705. P.S.Z., IV, 302.

534

Trade with Siberia

If he agreed to their request the Tsar would be encour
aging a dangerous addiction,
for ball-tobacco was said to cause fits if smoked injudic
iously. And the addiction
might result eventually in problems of law and order.
The results of a preliminary
investigation involving Siberian serving-men and a tobacco
dealer suggested that the
proposed measure might have other untoward consequences
. Yasak-payers, the
Tsar was told, might get ‘drunk’ on Chinese tobacco if
it were sold freely to them
and there would be, as a result, a great reduction in the furs
delivered as yasak.
Nevertheless the Tsar asked for further enquiries to be made
and he wrote to the
voevoda of Yeniseisk to this effect on 11 October 1700.94
Meanwhile the new scheme for taxing the lands of Siberian Bukhara
ns had failed
to get under way. In 1700 the Bukharan settlers had even managed
to secure
confirmation of their ancient exemptions from obrok, vydel'ny
i khleb, tyaglo,
pyatye and desyatye den'gi. In 1701, however, they discovered
that the authorities
had decided to assess their arable land for obrok to be paid in money and
on the basis
of Kochanov's survey. They tried to get this decision repealed by recallin
g the
exemptions of 1644, but in answer they received a letter from the Tsar in which
he
informed their leader, the Tobol'sk Bukharan Mulla Maksyuto (Mas‘id)
Alimov, that

they had only been exempted in 1644 because there were so few of them in Siberia
at
the time. Since then their numbers had increased to such an extent that they could no
longer be allowed to acquire land, fishing or hunting-rights, either from his subjects
or from the yasak-paying Tatars.
In view of his reply the Siberian Bukharans realised that they would have to
amend their requests. In what appears to have been his second letter to the Tsar
Maksyuto Alimov no longer asked for the repeal of the new tax, but only for a
lowering of the rate of assessment. Referring back to the exemptions granted to them
in 1644, 1649, 1669, 1697 and 1700 in consideration of their status as foreigners

and immigrants, he explained that their economic situation had severely deteriorated
in the previous few years. Their settlements had caught fire and had been completely
destroyed, their numbers had declined and their crops had been disappointingly
small. In 1696 and 1697 their ploughed fields and hayfields had been flooded and
waterlogged, so that neither wheat nor hay had been produced. They were now poor
and in debt. In view of their pitiful circumstances he begged for mercy and asked the
Tsar to allow them to pay a reduced rate of 30 den'gi per desyatina under rye instead
of the proposed 40, and half the rate (10 den'gi) per desyatina of spring wheat.
Nothing was said about the payment of 1 den'ga per haystack, which implies that it
was too small for the Bukharans to raise any objection to it. Alimov's arguments
carried weight with the Tsar, for it did not suit him to ruin his Siberian Bukharans.
He wrote therefore to the Tobol'sk voevody in July 1701 and ordered them to reduce

the Bukharan liability to obrok to the level suggested until further notice.%
Siberian Bukharans were well satisfied with the results of Alimov's efforts.
During the eighteenth century they continued to serve the Tsar, to till their lands, and
to defend their privileges. They also maintained a close rapport with visiting
Bukharans. The activities of these visitors changed little: they still bought Siberian
93 Fedor Lyalin was described as a tobacco promyshlennik which meant that he either grew tobacco
or dealt in it.
94 Mezhov, Sibirskaya bibliografiya, no.1538. Pamyatniki Sibirskoi istorii, I, 88.

95 Ogloblin, I, 66. P.S.Z., IV, 168-70.
535

Bukharan trade

furs to take to China and, in addition to the materials which they imported legally,
they smuggled rhubarb and tobacco into Siberia. Even Subhan Quli's envoy to
Tobol'sk was reputed to be selling large quantities of forbidden ball-tobacco in his

quarters in 1702!96
Before leaving the Siberian trade something should be said about the contribution
made to it by the Bukharans' Russian competitors, whether from Siberia or from
Muscovy proper. These merchants dealt in similar goods and generally paid more
dues in Siberia than in Muscovy, for many of the trade taxes repealed in 1653 and
1654 continued to be enforced in Siberia until 1692, despite the regulations which the
Regent introduced in 1687, in response to complaints lodged four years earlier by
various merchants from Muscovy. According to Aleksandrov, the Regent then
decreed that obrok should be paid only once a year. She also abolished the majority
of petty dues and introduced a limited warehouse fee, to be paid only in cases when a
merchant stayed a very long time in a town and occupied most of its warehousing
space. But although the new regulations are said to have resulted in an increase in

trade and a 22% decrease in the amounts taken in tax,%” they cannot have been fully
enforced, for they had to be repeated by Peter the Great in 1692. In July of that year
he wrote to the Customs officials of Verkhotur'e to make it clear that merchants
should only pay obrok once a year and that several taxes should be waived, including
the stamp duty (which had been retained by his predecessor). The Customs chief of
Verkhotur'e was instructed not to ask for a second payment of obrok from merchants
who had already paid it once that year, either in Siberia or in Muscovy. He was
notified of the abolition of ten taxes in Siberia which included declaration, storage
and departure taxes, dues payable on boats, sledges and house beams, and taxes on
heating and firewood. And he was told to take instead a single payment of rublevaya

poshlina (at 20 den'gi per rouble).%
This simplification of the tax system in Siberia was well overdue, and in many
ways it echoed the regulations introduced in Muscovy in 1653 and 1654, although
the rate of the Siberian rublevaya was twice as high as that of the Muscovite
rublevaya of 1653. Its rate, however, was not new to Siberia, for it had applied at
least since 1640 to such items as fish, gingerbread, materials, hats, tin dishes, copper
cauldrons and cups, and it was hoped that the new regulations would achieve the
dual purpose of encouraging trade and easing the lot of the local population. To give
a few examples of the savings that were likely to ensue, obrok payments, introduced

in Siberia in 1621, ranged between 60 den'gi and 600 den'gi,®9 and the declaration
tax (yavchaya) was 4 den'gi per person, even if not carrying goods. The boat tax
(posazhennoe) was assessed at 20 den'gi per sazhen of a boat, warehousing dues
(poambarnoe) cost about 13 den'gi per week and 50 den'gi for four weeks. The
96 Potanin, "O karavannoi torgovle", 75, 93-94. Cahen, XXV.

97 Aleksandrov, "K voprosu", 139-40.

98 P.S.Z., Ill, 132-3, 141. The taxes abolished were the yavchaya charged per person
(pogolovshchina), the poambarshchina

(ambarnaya/poambarnoe),

teplovoe (heating tax),

privorotnoe (this, according to Lantzeff (142), was a departure tax, which is very likely as the
word privorotnyi has some connection with the gates of a town), polozovoe (tax on sledges),
posazhennoe paid on boats, pechatnoe (stamp tax), venechnoe (tax on house beams) and the
drovyanoe (tax on logs/firewood). Ogloblin, II, 22-23.

99 Butsinskii, 251-2, 255.
536

Trade with Siberia

stamp duty (pechatnaya) payable on transactions was 1 den'ga per rouble in 1664
and there was 4 den'gi per rouble to pay on taking unsold items out of the gostinyi

dvor (ot'ezzhaya).!00

No doubt the abolition of the petty taxes helped traders, but other taxes remained
which affected all the Russians involved with trading in Siberia, whether they were
posadskie lyudi, officials or soldiers. The posadskie lyudi were liable to tyaglo and
also had to give the state a double tithe of one-fifth of the grain produced in their
fields. This tax was called vydel'nyi khleb, more correctly vydel'nyi pyatyi snop
(one sheaf in five) and, according to Butsinskii, it added up to as much as 22
chetverti per posadskii chelovek in 1631.10! Like all other Russians trading in
Siberia, they had to pay 20 den'gi per rouble as sbornye den'‘gi on the value of their

possessions.!°? And in their capacity as posadskie lyudi, they were required to pay

special taxes for the maintenance of the army and to serve the Tsar, if required, as

Customs

officials, firemen,

policemen,

tax-collectors.

Other duties included

supervising the baths and fisheries, checking the quantities of fur collected, growing,
buying or distributing grain for the state, and acting as prison officers. It is hardly
surprising in the circumstances that many of them tried to change their station in life
in 1631 and to enroll as yamshchiki (government haulage-cum-postal agents) or as
peasants, instead of remaining posadskie lyudi, as they then became exempt from
obrok, vydel'nyi khleb and the obligation to till the Tsar's land. Unfortunately the
consequent loss to the Treasury, and the increased burden on the remaining
posadskie lyudi proved to be so great, that those who broke away were often
compelled to resume their former status.1%
None of these taxes and obligations fell on visiting Bukharans and, as mentioned
above, even Siberian Bukharans were exempt from them until 1701. Russian
merchants were thus at a disadvantage and this disadvantage was compounded by the
fact that, at least until 1693, they paid import and sales taxes at 20 den'gi per rouble,
or double the rate demanded from visiting Bukharans. They also paid transit dues
(proezzhaya poshlina) and, according to the extracts from the Tobol'sk records for
1625 and 1640 which are reproduced by Butsinskii, transit dues brought in between

one-fifth and one-sixth of the total amount accruing from trade dues.!% In view of

100 Ogioblin, II, 23-24. Golovachev, 145, 148.
101 Butsinskii, 255, 256. The weight of the chetvert' varied greatly during the seventeenth century.
Sakharov (114) says this was 12 pud (196.56 kg) in about 1610, but the examples given by
Klyuchevskii ("Russkii rubl"", 5-10) appear to indicate that the Moscow chetvert' weighed 4 pud
until the middle of the seventeenth century when its weight doubled to 8 pud. He adds that the
pud was then somewhat heavier than the modern one and that these two measures should be
taken as equal respectively to four and two-thirds, and nine and one-third of a modem pud (77.81
kg and 152.33 kg). If this is correct, then the amount collected in 1631 (22 chetverti) would
have been something of the order of 1,678 kg, which was a crippling amount if the posadskie
lyudi only tilled an area of 2.5 desyatiny (6.7 acres), producing 68.7 chetverti per desyatina.
Shunkov, Ocherki, 13, 14, 129, 131, explains that two desyatina (5.4 acres) were expected to

produce 30 chetei (chetverti) of rye plus 25 chetei of oats. A./., III, 314-5. N.B. New settlers in
Siberia were not satisfied with the half desyatina given to them by the Tsar. By 1632 they had
increased their holding to a minimum of 2.5 desyatiny each.

102 Tobol'sk, 36-41.
103 Butsinskii, 252-3, 255.
104 Ogloblin, I, 66. P.S.Z., IV, 169. Butsinskii, 142, 181, gives the rate of the proezzhaya as 8
den'gi per rouble in the case of Berezov and seems to suggest that only one payment of this tax

was required, perhaps at the time when merchants left the first town visited in Siberia, for he

33f

Bukharan trade

seem surprising
the numerous limitations on their activities outlined above, it may
is particularly
This
r.
altogethe
that Russians did not give up trading in Siberia
Muscovy for
from
over
came
who
Russians
difficult to explain in the case of those
according to
Yet
trade.
to
order
in
there
travel
to
need
this purpose, for they had no
seventeenth
the
of
course
the
in
grew
market
Siberian
the
of
share
Vilkov, their

ns which
century, and they even managed to trade with China, in spite of the regulatio

forced them to obtain a special licence for each of their journeys.10°

for
One can only assume, therefore, that the margin of profit was very attractive

were
every type of merchant involved in the Siberian and Chinese trade. There
as
well
as
traders,
local
them,
among
Siberia
in
government officials working
Moscow.
or
Kazan'
Ufa,
as
away
far
as
from
came
who
gosti
or
posadskie lyudi
They included Tatars, soldiers, Cossacks and serving-men, some of whom even
hired themselves out as agents to visiting Bukharans.!°6 One famous gost’ was
Gavrilo Romanovich Nikitin, who himself went to China from Selenginsk in 1674
and who subsequently sent his agents and clerks on several well-armed expeditions

to Siberia and China.!07

In 1693, either because the system of taxation outlined in his letter of 1692 to
Verkhotur'e had not yet been universally adopted, or because he wanted to attract
even greater numbers of Muscovite merchants to Siberia, Peter the Great issued a
similar, but even more comprehensive set of instructions to all the Customs chiefs of
the province. These instructions applied to ‘Russian, Siberian, Chinese, Bukharan’
traders and to the dues payable on ‘all manner of goods’. Their aim was to
standardize

the tax rates, while

also increasing

the amounts

accruing

to the

Treasury.!08 The instructions which were of direct relevance to Bukharan traders
have already been mentioned above, but we shall try and concentrate here on the
rules which also affected their Muscovite rivals or which were specifically aimed at
them. On goods or money brought from Muscovy they were to pay two lots of
desyataya at 20 den'gi per rouble, first at the frontier, and then at the time of sale.
The same liability would be incurred on goods brought over from Bukhara or China,
on the export of Russian goods and on the sale of furs. A lesser rate of 6 den'gi per
rouble would only be charged if the goods exported were Siberian. The new and
higher warehouse fee of 18 den'gi per week on unsold goods also applied to them.
In the case of unsold furs, although desyataya had been paid on bringing them to
market there would be another 20 den'gi per rouble as perekupnaya at the time of
sale.
Thus the import, export and sales taxes were all charged (separately) at the high
rate of 20 den'gi per rouble, the only exception being the 6 den'gi per rouble charged
on the export of Siberian goods. And, although the new system had the advantage of
being uniform and far less complicated than the infinite variety of tariffs which,
according to Aleksandrov, had existed in such centres as Nerchinsk on the Chinese

says that if proezzhaya had been paid in Tara it was not paid again in Tobol'sk.

105 Vilkov, Remeslo, 179-80, 186, 207-8, 281, 296, 300-1.
106 Thid., 207. Materialy, 354-62. See Ziyaev, Ekonomicheskie

svyazi, 69, for a Cossack and a

Muscovite sent to Narym in 1654 and Kuznetsk in 1675 as agents.
107 Bakhrushin, "Torgi". See Vilkov, Remeslo, 211, for an expedition to China in 1694 of 22
traders which did not include a single Siberian Bukharan or Tatar.

108 Aleksandrov, "K voprosu", 140-1.

538

Trade with Siberia
frontier between 1690 and 1692, it was bound to affect
the Muscovites. Tax at the

new rate had been paid for many years on sales, but it had
not applied previously to
imports and exports.! In order to mitigate the impact of
the new rules, therefore, a
few concessions were made to merchants. Thus, after confirm
ing that the obrok
would continue to be paid only once a year, as ruled by his predece
ssor in 1687, the

Tsar added that the new rate for this tax would be 50 kopecks
(100 den'gi) and this

would apply to every rank of Russian trader coming over
to Siberia, except for
casual labourers with no fixed abode (gulyashchie ) who would pay
half that amount.
A major concession was made with regard to sables, for the export
to China of pelts
costing between 20 to 40 roubles for a bundle of 40 was henceforth permitt
ed for his
Subjects, as well as Bukharans and Tatars, and no limits were placed
on the
quantities which they could take out of the country. Finally in order to
ensure the
allegiance of his serving-men and perhaps compensate them for the hardshi
ps of
serving in Siberia, Peter the Great declared that when they were sent to
Muscovy on
official business they would pay neither travel nor transit dues on their
first 50

roubles' worth of goods.!10

The few concessions made by the Tsar, however, were little compensation for
the increased burden which his regulations of 1693 placed on Muscovites. Indeed the
new rules were so stringent that they defeated their purpose, leading on the one hand

to discontent, malpractices and loss of interest in the Siberian and Chinese trade, and

on the other to a decrease in the revenue collected in Customs dues and taxes, 11!

The Tsar therefore decided to alter his approach, and he did so five years later, on
23 November 1698, when he issued a completely different set of instructions to the
officials of all the Siberian and Northern towns in the hope of encouraging trade and
introducing such a fair system of tax collection that Muscovite merchants would no
longer try to evade it.
He began by explaining that excessive taxes might well drive traders to abandon
Siberia altogether, thus decreasing the state revenue and also depriving Siberia of
essential goods. In view of this danger he had decided to repeal all ‘superfluous’
dues, so that no more than 20 den'gi per rouble (desyataya) was paid to the Treasury
on any item. Thus, a merchant would pay either a tax in kind of one in ten, or a
money tax of 20 den'gi per rouble on the sale price of his goods, but he would not
have to pay tax again if he purchased other goods with the proceeds of sale.
Similarly, once desyataya had been paid on certain goods at the frontier with Siberia,
no further payments would be required on the same items within Siberia, either as a
declaration fee on arrival at a Siberian town, or when the goods were sold. The
yavchaya and the perekupnaya of 20 den'gi per rouble should be waived, for to
demand either tax on these items would be as ‘improper’ as it was ‘burdensome’. In
case this was not clear enough, the Tsar explained that if a merchant purchased furs,
109 Aleksandrov, "K voprosu", 141, says 2.5% (5 den'gi per rouble?) was paid on (bringing) money
and Chinese fur to market, on having goods entered in registers and on buying Chinese goods in
Nerchinsk. Five per cent was paid on imported hops and on imported Russian and Chinese
goods, and ten per cent was charged to fishermen on their catch, to trappers on their furs and
also to buyers on their purchases of fur.

110 p._§.Z., III, 160-6. A similar concession, which abolished import duties on goods taken into
Muscovy up to the value of 50 roubles, had been granted in 1692 to Siberians of all ranks.

P.S.Z, Ul, 138.
111 fhid., 491.

539

Bukharan trade

walrus tusks, musk and other goods with the money arising from the sale of his
imported goods, he must not be taxed, either on the money or on his purchase. His
money had already been taxed indirectly at the frontier. As for the goods purchased,
they had already borne the one in ten tax, or 20 den'gi per rouble, when the trappers
and small ‘entrepreneurs’ (promyshlennye lyudi) who secured them in the first place
had brought them to market. In any case, ‘out of kindness and consideration for the
requests of serving-men and traders’ the Tsar had decided that in future purchasers
would no longer be required to pay 20 den'gi per rouble on their transactions. Only
the seller would pay this desyataya.!!2
Particular consideration was given to the trappers’ interests, the Tsar stating
repeatedly that every pelt taken from a bundle of ten for his Treasury, in accordance
with the desyataya (one in ten) tax, must be equal in quality to the other nine, and not
better. They must be matched exactly, good for good, middling for middling and
poor for poor. If the total was not divisible by ten, then 20 den'gi per rouble should
be charged on a fair assessment of the value of the furs, and if the merchant had no
ready cash, then the correct number of furs must be taken in lieu. Should the trapper
fail to sell his goods at the market, he must be allowed to take them to another town,

or even to China, and no further payment of 20 den'gi should be required from him,
for he had already paid this amount as yavlennaya on declaring his furs to the

authorities. 13
Money brought into Siberia to purchase goods would also be taxed at the same
rate, but the 20 den'gi per rouble would be split, half being paid on entry, and half
on leaving Siberia, either for China, or for Muscovy. The rules applying to the
Chinese trade were identical, only one payment of 20 den'gi per rouble being
required on the Muscovite goods exported to China, and this would be payable either
in Verkhotur'e in the west, or in Nerchinsk in the east. The payment at Verkhotur'e,
the Tsar explained, was only necessary in case merchants should try and trade illicitly
on their way through to China, thus depriving the Treasury of the relevant dues.
When they reached Nerchinsk they would not be asked to pay this sum again, (nor
would it be returned to them, for it would be kept as an export fee), but an additional
small charge of half a rouble per man would be taken to cover the wages of the
Customs personnel and the cost of checking the goods. Similarly, on goods brought
into Siberia from China, a single payment of 20 den'gi would be required at
Nerchinsk, and no transit or sales dues would be charged. However,

no doubt

because the margin of profit on such items was particularly substantial, an additional

tax, the perekupnaya, would have to be paid, also at 20 den'gi per rouble.!!4
So much for the abolition of ‘superfluous’ taxes, but this was not the only
achievement of the regulations of 1698. Peter the Great also offered many
concessions to the Muscovite traders. Firstly, they would benefit, together with

foreigners, from the new rule which allowed the import of small quantities of
Chinese ball-tobacco to Nerchinsk, provided that it was declared, that tax was paid at

10 den'gi per rouble and that it was sold at 12 to 14 den'gi per lb to Treasury
officials. Secondly, the Tsar urged his officials to show leniency to those of his

112 Jhid., 491-2, 497-8.
113 Thid., 499, 507. See above for the sections in these instructions which were particularly relevant
to the Bukharan agents of the Qalmaq and to other foreigners.

114 Thid., III, 498, 497, 499, 493.

540

Trade with Siberia

Subjects who might infringe the new trade rules. If
the infringements were negligible,
then punishment ought to be waived, and in any
case every allowance should be
made for genuine mistakes. Merchants who failed
to produce the necessary transit
papers (proezzhaya gramota) on arrival at the frontie
r would no longer be prevented
from travelling to Siberia or to China. Officials were
urged to take into consideration
the circumstances which might have led to such an irregul
arity and guidelines were
given for the treatment of defaulters. If they arrived at
Verkhotur'e, not having had
time to go to Moscow for these papers, they should be forgiv
en in consideration of
the great distances involved and the fact that perishable goods
from the northern
towns were unlikely to survive the journey to Siberia if transp
orted via Moscow.
Instead of sending them back, Customs officials should take the
stamp duty of one
rouble per merchant (pechatnaya rublevaya poshlina) which
they ought to have
paid in Moscow, and waive all other dues.!15 Then, after
keeping them on the
frontier for a year (!), no doubt in order to check their character and
good faith, they
could allow the defaulters into Siberia. Similar directives were given
in the case of
merchants from the Northern towns, or from Siberia,who arrived
at Nerchinsk
without the papers allowing access into China (priezzhie gramot
y) which they
should have obtained in Moscow. Officials should take into account the fact
that the
journey to the capital was too long to be practical in their case. And they
should be
allowed to go on to China after paying the pechatnaya pogolovnaya poshli
na of 1

rouble per person.!16

Leniency was also to be shown if a merchant who arrived at Verkhotur'e was
found to have more goods then stated in his transit papers. If the surplus items were
not worth more than 100-200 roubles, and the merchant swore that they had been

omitted from the list by mistake, then no sanction was to be applied. If the unlisted

goods were worth over 200 roubles and it seemed clear that the merchant had
intended to defraud the Customs, then he must be made to pay double the usual entry
fee of 20 den'gi per rouble. Second offenders, on the other hand, should be
submitted to the full rigours of the law, i.e. confiscation of goods, corporal
punishment and refusal of entry into Siberia. Another case where leniency was
recommended was that of traders who arrived at Nerchinsk (on their way back from
China) without the ready cash needed for the payment of import dues. Officials
should be prepared to make every allowance for them. If they asked for time in order
to get hold of the money, offered a guarantee, and appeared honest, such time should
be given, provided that the value of their goods did not exceed 200 roubles. But if
their goods were worth over 300 roubles, then no delay should be allowed, the
implication being that people who traded on such a large scale were bound to have
enough cash on them.!17
It was made clear to both voevody and officials that they must look after the
merchants, welcome them and treat them kindly so that they should ‘feel like trading
with China’, to the financial advantage of the Treasury and of the merchants
themselves. Peter the Great urged on his officials the importance of avoiding dilatory
115 This was a sizeable concession, for a few months earlier, in February (P.S.Z., III, 429) the Tsar

had ruled that merchants from the northern towns and Siberia arriving at Nerchinsk on their way
to China without the relevant transit pass should pay the usual dues as well as the one rouble
stamp duty which would have been taken in Moscow.

116 Thid, 506, 493, 498-9, 501, 498.
117 Thid., 495, 500.

541

Bukharan trade

as
action, because delays could result in personal hardship for the traders, as well
urgency,
of
cases
In
great losses of money and the total loss of perishable goods.
when the total freeze-up of trade routes was imminent, he suggested that the voevoda
should altogether waive the inspection of goods at the frontier. Instead the merchant
ought to be allowed to set off on his journey, accompanied by a sworn official who
would make sure that no irregularity was committed on the way, and who would

inspect and tax his goods on arrival. 118
Finally, in order to encourage ordinary Muscovite traders to participate in the
Chinese trade, the Tsar closed the frontier to most foreign merchants,!!9 and ruled
that none but members of the traders’ class would be allowed to take goods to China.
Priests and voevody were specifically mentioned among those excluded, and it was
explained that allowing the voevody to go through would only mean
‘unpleasantness, insults and robbery’, because the voevody had ‘never paid dues on

their goods’ and had consistently ‘robbed the State’.1°
Thus by the regulations of 1698 Peter the Great diminished the number of taxes
paid by his traders and secured for them the co-operation of the voevody and other
officials. He also tried to prevent malpractices on the part of his officials and to
protect merchants from unfair competition. However, his friendly and considerate
attitude had its limitations, for he was determined to get the lion's share of the

Chinese trade for himself. As mentioned in connection with Bukharan traders, he
instructed officials not to allow caravans to set off for China every year, as they
might flood the Chinese market with Russian goods, causing a dangerous drop in
value. Only by restricting access to China could the Chinese trade continue to bring
profit to the Treasury and to ‘the whole of the Russian people’, he declared, and only
a policy of self-restraint could ensure that Chinese buyers would retain their interest
in Russian commodities. Caravans, therefore, should only be despatched every other
year, and only if they included an official trade delegation; but in the event of the
delegation failing to arrive on time, then the caravan and all its traders, whether

Muscovite, Siberians or others, must be prevented from setting off.12!
Another damaging regulation, introduced that same year, required merchants
importing rich materials and precious stones from China to pay dues in pure silver
and gold, the Tsar specifying that the silver should be worth one rouble per zolotnik
(4.26 gr). This was slightly modified in January 1699, the official in charge of
Customs in Nerchinsk being instructed to take the tax in kind if consignments were
worth no more than 1,000 roubles. However, in the case of large consignments
payments in silver and gold would still be required, for two reasons, the first being
that the voevody had taken many poor quality items in payment of dues in the past,

and the second being that the price of damask had recently fallen in Moscow.
!22
By the end of the seventeenth century Bukharan traders were faced with many
more regulations and restrictions in Siberia than ever before. They also met with
increasing competition from several quarters. Not only did they have to defend their
share of the local market from the Qalmaq, they also had Chinese, Qazaq and

118 Thid., 494, 497, 501, 502, 505, 506.
119 See above for the special transit passes which they were required to obtain in duplicate.

120 p.§.Z., 502.
121 Thid., 502-3.
122 Tymanskii, II, 116-8.
542

Trade with Siberia

Muscovite competitors, and the Tsar himself was trying to oust them from the
Chinese trade. However, despite all these problems and the limitations which were
imposed on their commercial activities, they were not discouraged.
In Siberia, as in the other far-flung places which they visited, Bukharan
merchants continued to overcome all obstacles. Such was their interest in trade, that
they took in their stride the enormous difficulties of terrain, the extremes of heat and

cold, the heavy taxes and other exactions, and even the constant danger of attack by
the peoples whose territory they crossed on their way. Thus they were undaunted by
the likelihood of abuse and threats from the Shi‘a in Iran. They continued to travel
through Khwarazm despite the ever-present risk of imprisonment and extortionate
demands. Similarly, in order to reach Muscovy they were prepared to face armed
attacks and robbery by the Turkmen, Qazaq and Qalmaq. Only when the unsettled
situation, during the Time of Troubles, meant that their lives were in serious danger,
did they temporarily give up the Muscovite trade.
During their expeditions they braved both mountains and deserts, crossing the
Pamirs, the Hindu Kush and the Tien Shan, as well as the Gobi desert and the
Taklamakan. Eminently versatile, they constantly altered their stock-in-trade in order
to supply each country and each tribe with the necessities of the moment. They learnt
Uighur for the Qalmaq and Qirghiz trade, they made their way into China by posing
as envoys or joining official Qalmaq delegations. They represented Muscovite
interests in China, or Qalmaq interests in Siberia, with equal facility. Whatever the
difficulties, their enthusiasm for trade remained undiminished. And whether the

rulers of the khanate were at war, at peace, or on the brink of war with Iran, the
Qazags or India, the merchants of the khanate, undaunted, continued on their way,
for no matter what might happen ‘the show had to go on’.

543

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4

Genealogical tables
of

the Abulkhairids and Ashtarkhanids

Annotated tables of rulers

The Abilkhairids
or the descendants of the eleven sons of Abu 1 Khair

ruler of the steppes (1428-68)
Abi ’1 Khair's sons:
1. Shah Budagh.
2. Khwajah Muhammad.
3. Ahmad. No issue.
4. Muhammad. No issue.

5. Shaikh Haidar.
6. Sanjar.
7. Ibrahim. No issue.

8. Kuchkunchi.
9. Suyinch Khwajah or Suyunchik.

10. Ag Burag. No issue.
11. Sayyid Baba.

Abalkhairid
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.

rulers (1500-1599):

Muhammad Shaibani
Kiuchkinchi
Abu Sa‘id
‘Ubaidallah
‘AbdallahI
‘Abd al-Latif
Nauraz Ahmad
Pir Muhammad I
Iskandar
‘Abdallah II

545.
548.
549.
545.
549.
549.
549.
546.
547.
547.

‘Abd al-Mwu’ min
PirMuhammad I].

547.
546.

544

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INUIT],

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545

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Annotated

table of rulers

Annotated tables of rulers

Rulers of the khanate !

I Abalkhairids

“Abd al-Latif

947-9593
1540-1 to 1551-1552.4

Nauruz Ahmad/Buraq

959-5 Dhu ’1-qa‘da 963.

1551-2 to 10 September 1556.5
The following descendants of Abi ’1-Khair's son Jani Beg
are known as Janibegids
Pir MuhammadI

Dhi al qa'da 963 to 2969 or 975.
September 1556 to ?1561-2 or July 1567.6

Iskandar Bahadur
(with ‘Abdallah)

Sha‘ban 968-1 Jumada II 991.
April 1561-22 June 1583.7

“Abdallah I

?Jumada II 991-2 Rajab 1006.
?June or September 1583-8 February 1598.8

1 The dates of accession throughout refer to the proclamation or the first reading of the khutbah in
the name of the ruler, and not to the date of the formal coronation ceremony. Zambaur, 270,

Bosworth, 155, and Lane-Poole, Catalogue, have all been consulted.

2 They have often been erroneously called Shaibanids.
3 Davidovich, Korpus, 49. See also Zambaur.

4 Istoriya Uzbekistana, 50. Here his dates are given as 1541-1552. Hafiz Tanish, 40b-41a, gives no
exact date for his death.
5 Thid., 49b. Muhammad Yar, 75a, places his death 13 days later, on 18 Dhu ’] qa’da.
6 See pp. 16-17 above for the circumstances of his gradual loss of power. According to Hafiz
Tanish, 69a, 74a, he was still alive in the latter part of 974/July 1567 when ‘Abdallah paid him a
visit on his way to Khurasan. No exact date is given for his death, but “Abdallah referred to him as
to his late uncle in a letter of Rajab 975/January 1568. Muhammad Yar (IVAN Uzb.75a) places
Pir Muhammad's death much earlier, on 3 Sha‘ban 974/13 February 1567 and according to
Davidovich (Korpus, 129) Sultan Muhammad in Majma‘ al-ghara ’ib dates it 20 Sha‘ban/2
March. Zambaur, Lane-Poole and Bosworth give the far earlier and erroneous date of 968/1560-1.
7 Hafiz Tanish, 64a, 203b. Interestingly enough in the version published in facsimile by
Salahetdinova his limited accession is only dated ‘in the spring of 968 in the Year of the Hen’, and
the word Sha’ban has been omitted.
8 Ibid., 203b-7a. The exact date when the khutbah was read and coins were issued in his name is not
stated here, but this seems unlikely to have taken place much before his accession was solemnised
in Bukhara on 15 Sha’ban/Saturday4 September. For the date of his death see Hajji Mir, 148a.
Abi ’1 Fadl, Akbarnama, III, 276-7, gives the earlier date of 14 Bahman/3 February.

oon

Annotated tables of rulers

Rulers

of the khanate
(continued)

“Abd al-Mu’min

Pir Muhammad II

5 Rajab 1006-9 Tir 1006.
11 February 1598-30 June 1598.9
after 9 Tir 1006-?Dhi ’1-hijja 1007.

after 30 June 1598-?June-July 1599.10
II Ashtarkhanids

Yar Muhammad
(with Din Muhammad)

?Dhu ’1-hijja 1006-7 Muharram 1007.
July 1598-7 August 1598.

Yar Muhammad
(with Bagi Muhammad)

early 1008-?autumn 1009.
August 1599-?autumn 1600.

Jani Muhammad
(with Bagi Muhammad)

autumn 1009-Jumada I 1012.
autumn 1600-November 1603.

Baqi Muhammad

12 Jumada I 1012-Dhii ’! hijja 1013.
17 November 1603-May 1605.1!

Wali Muhammad

Dhi ’1 hijja 1013-end 1019.

(first reign)

before 19 May 1605-March 1611.!2

Wali Muhammad
(second reign)

16 Jumada II 1020-7 Rajab 1020.
26 August 1611-15 September 1611.

2 Zambaur. Abi ’1 Fadl, Akbarndma, III, 742. Hajji Mir, 149b, places his accession later, at the
end of the Year of the Hen, i.e. 22 March.

10 Mahmid b. Wali (51a-b) and Iskandar Beg (557) give the impression that he was chosen to rule
very soon after “Abd al-Mu’min's murder. On the other hand Ahmad b. Shams (554a) and Qipchaq
Khan (268b) place his accession in 1007, or after 4 August, and Zamibaur gives the more precise
date of Muharram 1007, or between 4 August and 3 September 1598. This, however, would
suggest that it took the amirs of Bukhara between 4 and 9 weeks to decide on a successor for ‘Abd
al-Mu’min's successor, which seems unlikely. See chapter 5 note 26 for his death.

11 Mahmad b. Wali, 73a-74a. Zambaur makes no mention of Yar Muhammad Khan and places Baqi

Muhammad's accession in 1009/July 1600-July 1601, which would imply that his father only

reigned a few months. Lane-Poole dates Baqi Muhammad's accession in 1007 (between 4 August

1598 and 24 July 1599) and his death in 1014 (between 19 May 1605 and 9 May 1606).
12 See above, 122-3. Zambaur gives 1014 as the year of his accession.

558

Annotated tables of rulers

Rulers of the khanate
(continued)

Imam Quli Bahadur

end 1019-6 Sha‘ban 1051.

March 1611-10 November 1641.13
Sayyid Nadir Muhammad

6 Sha‘ban 1051-1 Rabi‘I 1055.

(overall ruler)

10 November 1641-27 April 1645.14

Sayyid Nadir Muhammad

1 Rabi‘I 1055-28 JumadaI 1056.

(in Balkh only)

27 April 1645-12 July 1646.

Sayyid Nadir Muhammad

4 Ramadan 1057-16 Jumada I 1061.

(in Balkh only)

3 October 1647-7 May 1651.

Sayyid “Abd al-‘Aziz

1 Rabi‘I 1055-14 Shawwal 1092.
27 April 1645-27 October 1681.15

Sayyid Subhan Quli Bahadur

15 Shawwal 1092-11 Rabi‘II 1114.

28 October 1681-4 September 1702.16
Sayyid ‘Ubaidallah II

9 Rabi‘ II 1114 - 26 Muharram 1123.

2 September 1702 - 16 March 1711.17

13 Zambaur erroneously places his accession in 1017/1608-9. Hofman, III, 290, gives either 1017 or
1020/1611? for his accession and dates his abdication 1640.
14 Hajji Mir, 201b. Zambaur dates Nadir Muhammad's accession much earlier, in 1050 or between
April 1640 and April 1641.
15 Hajji Mir, 215b, 262a. Lahauri, II, 447. Muhammad Salih, II, 444. Zambaur's accession date of

1057/1647-8 is an obvious
invasion. See Mirza Amin,
Yusuf Munshi, 273b, places
(Istoriya, 114) places a year

error as this event was the cause and not the result of the Mughal
104a, and Hajji Mir, 288b, for his abdication, which Muhammad
just before Muharram 1091/2 February 1680, and which Akhmedov
later, on 1 Muharram 1092/21 January 1681.

16 Zambaur dates his accession 1091, or between 2 February 1680 and 21 January 1681. For his
death see note 131 to chapter 9.

17 Yajji Mir, 322a for this accession date. Mir Muhammad Amin, 23, 271, gives 23 Jumada 1116
(sic) for his accession and 26 Muharram 1123 for his death.

559

Annotated tables of rulers

Mughal Emperors

Akbar

28 Rabi‘ I 963-13 Jumada II 1014.

Jahangir

8 Jumada II 1014-28 Safar 1037.

Dawar Bakhsh

94 Rabi‘II 1037 to 25 or 26 Jumada I 1037.
712 November 1627 to 1-2 February 1628.

Shah Jahan

22 JumadaI 1037-717 Ramadan 1068.
30 January 1628-718 June 1658.7!

Shuja‘

after 7 Dha ’I-hijja 1067-c. 19 Rabi‘TI 1069.
after 16 September 1657-c. 14 January 1659.

Murad Bakhsh

23 Safar 1068-4 Shawwal 1068.
30 November 1657-5 July 1658.

Aurangzib

1 Dhii ’I-qa‘da 1068-28 Dha *I-qa‘da 1118.
31 July 1658 to 3-4 March 1707.22

10 February 1556 to 25-26 October 1605.1?

21 October 1605-7 November 1627.2°

18 All the dates used for the Mughal Emperors are taken from Hodivala's very thorough study, 26577. He takes into account the sighting of the moon, which explains why in many cases his date

for the beginning of a month differs from that in Wistenfeld's tables. He also explains that a
death which occurred in the night could be attributed to either day. A particular problem with

regard to accession dates was the practice of choosing an official
at the beginning of a month or the beginning of the lunar year.
the actual date of the coronation ceremony, and even less with the
19 He apparently died in the night of 25-26 October. Burgess, 35,

anniversary for a julis, usually
This had little connection with
date of proclamation.

61, places Akbar's death a day

earlier. Zambaur, 300.

20 Abi ’l-Muzaffar, 1. This date for the accession, given by Jahangir, was probably the date when
his dying father chose him and when the khutbah was read in his name. Hodivala, 268-9 and
Zambaur, 300, give a later date of 20 Jumada II/3 November which may refer instead to the
coronation or julus.

21 Hodivala, 270-1. Zambaur. Majumdar. Burgess, 83, 104, gives 8 Jumada II 1037/14 February
1628 for his accession and Ramadan 1068 for his deposition.

22 Hodivala, 275-6. Zambaur, 300. Burgess, 104, dates Aurangzib's takeover one day earlier, on 30
July, but in any case the khutbah can only have been read in his name on the following Friday,
i.e., on 3 Dhii ’1-qa‘da/2nd August.

560

Annotated tables of rulers

Safawid rulers of Iran 23

Isma’il I

907-19 Rajab 930
1501-23 May 1524.

Tahmasp

19 Rajab 930-15 Safar 984.
23 May 1524-14 May 1576.

Isma‘il I

27 Jumada I 984-13 Ramadan 985.
22 August 1576- 24 November 1577.

Muhammad Khudabanda

3 Dhu ’!-hijja 985-deposed 7994

10-11 February 1578-deposed ?1586.74
Hamza (regency)

993-22 Dhiu ’!-hijja 994.

1585-4 December 1586.25

Abii Talib (regency)

22 Dhii ’I-hijja 994-230 Dha ’Lhijja 995.
4 December

1586-?1 December 1587.26

“Abbas I

730 Dhia 1 hijja 995-24 Jumada I 1038.
?1 December 1587-19 January 1629.27

Safi I

723 Jumada I 1038-12 Safar 1052.
716-17 February 1629 to 11-12 May 1642.78

23 Rabino di Bogormale and Iskandar Beg have generally been followed for the dates of this dynasty.
24 He only abdicated formally in Dha ’l-qa’da 995/October 1587. Zambaur, 261, says erroneously
that he died within 985, or a few weeks after his accession.
25 His reign is not mentioned by Bosworth, perhaps because he was only a Regent, and his father
was still officially in charge.
26 Like Hamza he was ruling on behalf of his father as heit-apparent and Regent, and his blind
ineffectual father was still officially in charge.

27 He had earlier ruled in name only for about a year from 989/1581. Rabino di Bogormale places
his accession in late Dha ’1 hijja 995 or Muharram 996, i.e. December 1587. Zambaur, 261,
gives the more precise date of 1 Muharram/2 December for his accession and the earlier date of 19
Dhi 71
Jumada I for the death. Cambridge History of Iran, VI, 261, give 16 October 1587 (14
qa’ da) for his accession.
but 28
28 Rabino di Bogormale. Zambaur places his accession on 10 Jumada I 1038/5 January 1629
279.
V1,
Iran,
of
History
Cambridge
in
given
is
II)
Jumada
(3
January 1629

561

Annotated tables of rulers

Safawid rulers of Iran
(continued)

“Abbas II

16 Safar 1052-26 Rabi‘! 1077.

16 May 1642-25 September 1666.79
Safi I
(first reign)

3 Rabi‘II 1077-Shawwal 1079.
3 October 1666-March 1669.3°

Safi II

19 Shawwal 1079 to 2-3 Jumada II 1105.

(second reign as Sulaiman I)

22 March 1669-29 January 1694.3!

Sultan Husain

14 Dhi ’I-hijja 1105-11 Muharram 1135.
7-8 August 1694-22 October 1722.

29 Muhammad Yusuf Walih, 158a, and Zambaur agree about his accession date. His death, according
to the Cambridge History of Iran (V1, 301) occurred on 26 Rabi‘II/25-26 October, but Wali Quli
Shamli, 47b, places it one day earlier. Both Chardin (Le Couronnement, 5), who gives his death

as 26 Rabi‘I/25 September and Luft (151) say he died in the night of 25 September.
30 Cambridge History of Iran, V1, 305. Here his first coronation is dated 1 November 1667.
31 Rabino di Bogormale. Chardin, Le Couronnement, 384, dates the second coronation 20 March
1669. Cambridge History of Iran, V1, 306-8, places his second coronation on 20 May 1668 (sic)
and his death on 20 July 1694.

562

Annotated tables of rulers

Tsars of Muscovy 32

Ivan IV, the Terrible

1533-28 March 1584.

The Time of Troubles

1584-1613.

Fedor I

29 March 1584-17 January 1598.

Boris Godunov

27 February 1598-24 April 1605.

Vasilii Shuisky

30 May 1606-28 July 1610.

Mikhail Romanov

4 March 1613-24 July 1645.

Aleksei Mikhailovich

24 July 1645-9 February 1676.

Fedor II

9 February 1676-8 May 1682.

The Regent Sophia

8 May 1682-710 October 1689.33

Ivan V and Peter the Great

8 May 1682-9 February 1696.

Peter the Great

9 February 1696-9 February 1725.

32 Dates taken from the Bol'shaya Sovetskaya entsiklopedia have been changed to New Style (i.e.,

as per the Gregorian Calendar).
(Old
33 Grey, 63, says she was sent off to the Novodevichii monastery "at the end of September"
Style).

563

Annotated tables of rulers

Qazaq Khans 34

Haqq Nazar

944 to Rabi‘I 988.
1537-8 to April-May 1580.35

Shighai

Rabi‘I 988 to 7990.

April-May 1580 to ?May 1582.36
Tawakkul

2990-71007.

?May 1582-autumn 1598.37
Ishim, Abuli and Tursin

21007-1022.
autumn 1598 to 1613-4.38

Tursun

1022 to 1036.
1613-4 to 1626-7.39

Ishim

1036 to early 1038.
1626-7 to September 1628.49

Abili and others

1038 to early 1040
September 1628-September 1630.4!

34 The rather simplistic view of the succession given in Howorth and in Istoriya Kazakhskoi SSR
(Tawakkul, Ishim, Jahangir) has been amended, mainly in accordance with evidence found in

Mahmid b. Wali.
35 See Sultanov, Kochevye plemena, 112 and Abuseitova, Kazakhskoe khanstvo, 46-9, for his
accession. See Hafiz Tanish, 155b, and pp. 35-36 above, for the circumstances leading to his

death.

36 Thid., 175a. He is not mentioned after 29 April 1582.
37 Sultanov, Kochevye plemena, 112, gives his dates as "after 991/1583-1007/1598.

38 Sultanov, Kochevye plemena, 112, makes Ishim the only ruler of the Qazaqs at that time and
gives his dates as 1007 to c.1022/1598 to 1613-4. This seems to tie up with Mahmid b. Walli's
evidence (101b-3a) according to which in the third year from Imam Quli's juliis (i.e. 1022) when

the Bukharan ruler marched against the Qazaqs, he received the submission of Tursin whom he
made governor of Tashkent, after which it would appear that Tursun was the most powerful of the
Qazaq Princes. See Khilkov, 421 and Abi ’1-Ghazi, tr. 328-9, text, 306, for Tursin as "khan of

the Qazaqs".
39 Mahmid b. Wali, 110a, gives 1036 as the year when an expedition to Mughulistan by Ishim was
followed by the outbreak of hostilities between Ishim and Tursin, resulting in the death of
Tursiin. Sultanov, Kochevye plemena, 112, places Tursiin's death in 1037/1627 (i.e. after 12
September 1627).

40 Mahmid b.Wali, 110a-la. Sultanov, Kochevye plemena, 112, gives the dates for Ishim's second
reign as "c. 1037/162 to early 1038/1628".

41 Mahmid b.Wali, 113a-b.
564

Annotated tables of rulers

Qazaq Khans
(continued)

Jahangir b.Ishim

1040-early 1048

(with Baqi b. Tursiin)

September 1630 to 7May 1638.42

Jahangir b.Ishim

early 1048-1062
May 1638-1652.43

Tauka

1062 to 1130-1
1652 to 1717-8.44

42 Tbid., 236b.
43 Sultanov, Kochevye plemena, 112, dates his reign "after 1039/1629-30 to 1062/1651-2".
Kalmytskie istoriko-literaturnye pamyatniki, 82, place his death at the hands of 17-year-old
Galdan in 1652.
44 Sultanov, Kochevye plemena, 112, gives his dates as ‘after 1062-1130/1652 to 1717-8’, which
would imply that his accession took place in 1063, i.e., between 2 December 1652 and 22
November 1653.

565

Annotated tables of rulers

Khans

Hajji Muhammad/Hajjim

of Khwarazm

965-spring 1011.

1558-spring 1603.45
‘Arab Muhammad

spring 1011-Dhu ’! qa‘da 1031.
spring 1603-September 1622.46

Habash & Ilbars

1031-?after Dhu ’! ga‘da 1032.

September 1622-?after August 1623.47
Isfandiyar

after Dhu ’1] ga‘da 1032-spring 1051.

after August 1623-spring 1642.48
Sayyid Muhammad/Yushan

spring 1051-?Dht ’1-hijja 1052.

spring 1642-?March 1643.49
Nadir Muhammad

?Dhi ’1-hijja 1052-summer 1055.

?March 1643-summer 1645.5°

45 Abii ’1-Ghazi, tr. 272, 294, text 255, 273, places his accession in the Year of the Horse 965 (i.e.
965-6/March 1559-March 1559) and his death in the Year of the Tiger/Dragon (bars) 1011 (ice.,
1010-1011/March

1602-3). Zambaur, 274 and Lane-Poole, Muslim dynasties, 279, give 965-

1011, and Lane-Poole adds that this was 1558-1602.
46 Khilkov, 406. When Khokhlov, who left Bukhara for Khiva on 24 September 1622, was half-

way there, he was told that ‘Arab Muhammad had just been deposed. According to Aba ’1-Ghazi,
tr. 294, 308, text 273, 287, ‘Arab Muhammad was blinded much earlier, in the Year of the Fowl
1030 (i.e., 1030-1/March 1621-March 1622). Zambaur, 274, gives ‘Arab Muhammad's dates as
1011-1032 (1602-3 to 1622-3). The dates given in Lane-Poole's Muslim dynasties (279), are as

follows: 1011-1032/1602-1623.

47 Khilkov, 406, 418-9. They were still very much in control when Khokhlov left for Muscovy
about August 1623.

48 Aba ’1-Ghazi, tr. 319, 338, text 297-8, gives the Year of the Pig (1032-3/March 1623-March
1624) for Isfandiyar's accession and the Year of the Horse (1051-2/March 1642-March 1643) or

rather the beginning of the Year of the Horse for his death, for he adds that a year after Isfandiyar's
death, at the beginning of the Year of the Sheep (March 1643) he himself was proclaimed in the

Aral region.
49 TsGADA, fond 134, op.1, 1641 no.2, listy 86-87, 92, 142. His reign had started by the time

Gribov arrived in Karagan in late May-early June 1642 and it ended shortly after the arrival in

Khwarazm of the Bukharan army which was despatched there on 20 February O.S.(2 March
1643). Abu *I-Ghazi totally ignores Sayyid Muhammad's reign, and so do Zambaur (274) and

Lane-Poole (Muslim dynasties, 279) who state erroneously that Isfandiyar reigned until 1643,

when he was replaced by Abii ’I-Ghazi.

50 See chapter 7 for a discussion of the date when Nadir Muhammad's rule over Khwarazm may have
come to an end.

566

Annotated tables of rulers

Khans

of Khwarazm
(continued)

Abu ’1-Ghazi

summer 1055 to 1072-3.

summer 1645 to 1662-3.5!

Anusha Muhammad

1072-3 to ?late 1095-early 1096.
1662-3 to ?late 1684-early 1685.52

Khudaida

Plate 1095-early 1096 to 71099-1100
late 1684-early 1685 to ?71688-9.53

Arang

71099-1100 to7 Rabi‘I 1106.
21688-9 to 26 October 1694.54

Jachi

7 Rabi‘I 1106-71106.

26 October 1694 to?1694-5.55

51 Aba ’1-Ghazi, tr. 357, text 334. He abdicated in his son's favour some time after the expedition to

Bukhara which took place in the Year of the Tiger (1072-3/March 1662- March 1663).

52 Mirza Amin, 126b-7b. Anusha was deposed during Subhan Quli's campaign to Balkh. This
campaign was undertaken after Anusha had lost Samargand, probably on 9 Dhii ’I-hijja 1095/17
November 1684. It should be noted, however, that in a paper as yet unpublished ("Ashtarkhanidy,
Arabshahidy i kazakhskie khany: numizmaticheskie danny k istorii vzaimootnoshenii") which he
delivered in Tashkent in September 1996 the archaeologist Boris Kochnev reported the discovery
of a cache of 68 tanga minted by Anusha in Samargand, one of which bears the date 1096,

indicating that his brief rule of the town might have taken place in that year, and not in 1095.
53 Shir Muhammad, 455, says he only ruled two years, but gives no dates for his reign. He could
have ruled until 1099 or 1100/late 1688-early 1689, for only in Rajab 1100/after 21 April 1689
did his brother and successor, Arang, write to the rulers of Muscovy to announce his own
accession (TsGADA, fond 134, op.2, 1689 no.43). For reasons of trade Arang would have tried to
establish relations with Muscovy as soon as possible during his reign, but he had already been on
the throne for some months, for he complained about a recent attack on Khwarazm by the tsars'
Qalmaq vassal, Ayuka, undertaken while he himself had been campaigning in the khanate.

Ayuka's campaign is most likely to have taken place while the Bukharan army was in Khurasan,
where they stormed Bala Murghab in Rabi‘I 1100 (24 December 1688 to 12 January 1689).
N.B. Khudaida's reign is not mentioned by Lane-Poole, Zambaur or his successor Arang.
54 Mirza Amin, 148b-9b. Shir Muhammad, 456. Zambaur and Lane-Poole erroneously place his
death in 1099/1687.
55 D.A.L, X, 379, 384. According to a Muscovite envoy, Fedor Skibin, who was in Turkestan from

July 1694, Kabakly came over shortly after Arang's death, fought his way into Khiva and put
Arang's sons to death. Qipchaq Khan, 284a, says Jujiq's reign ended in 1106, i.e. before 11
August 1695. Shir Muhammad's evidence about Jichi's reign is contradictory for, although he

says (457) that it lasted 3 years, he adds that Jaichi's successor, Wali, came to the throne in

1108/1696-7.

567

Annotated tables of rulers

Khans

of Khwarazm
(continued)

Kabakly

21106 to ?Rabi‘ I 1107.
? 1694-5 to ?October 1695.56

Qul Muhammad

?Rabi‘I 1107-28 Rabi‘I 1109.
2October 1695-4 October 1697.57

Shah Niyaz

28 Rabi‘I 1109-71112.
4 October 1697-?1700-1.58

Musi

71112-?before 22 Shawwal 1114.

21700-1-before 11 March 1703.59
“Arab Muhammad II

1114.
1703.

Hajjim Muhammad II

1114-?spring 1126.

1703-?spring 1714.69

56 D.A.1., X, 384. According to Skibin, as in the case of Arang, Kabakly was killed by the ataliqs,
after which they fetched Kalmamet (Qul Muhammad) from the Aral region and put him on the
throne.
57 Thid. His reign is not mentioned by Oriental historians. It probably ended with the accession of

Shah Niyaz.
58 For the exact date of his accession see Mirza Amin, 171b. See also TsGADA, fond 134, op.1,
1699-1700 no.1, listy 17-18, 77 and Materialy, 267; P.S.Z., IV, 61-62, for a translation of his
letter to Peter the Great which states that he came to the throne in the year (7)205 O.S., ie.,

between September 1696 and September 1697; Shir Muhammad, 457-8, who places his accession
in 1110/1698-9. For his death see Qipchaq Khan (285a) according to whom Shah Niyaz died in
1112/1700-1, after which his successor, Misi Sultan, was appointed by Subhan Quli. Shir
Muhammad, 458, appears to place Shah Niyaz's death in 1114 or 1115 and says he was succeeded
first by his son, Shah Baght, who ruled for one year, and then by Sayyid ‘Ali Khan whose reign
started in 1115 or 1116 and did not last long. Zambaur and Lane-Poole (Muslim dynasties, 279)

give Shah Niyaz's dates as 1099-1114/1687-1702.

59 Masi Sultan must have died some time before 22 Shawwal 1114/11 March 1703 when ‘Arab
Muhammad II sent an envoy to Moscow. Materialy, 273-6, 276n.
60 Zambaur and Lane-Poole both place Hajji Muhammad's accession in 1114, which would imply
that ‘Arab Muhammad only reigned a few months. His successor, Yadgar, came to the throne in
1126/1714 and apparently wrote two letters to announce his accession to Peter the Great in May
of that year. TSGADA, fond 134, op.2, 1714, nos. 48, 49. See also op.1, 1713 no.1, for the

arrival of Yadgar's ambassador in Russia.

568

Annotated tables of rulers

Ottoman

Sulaiman I
(the Magnificent)

Sultans 58

17 Shawwal 926 to 20-21 Safar 974.

30 September 1520 to 6-7 September
1566.99
15 Rabi‘I 974-7 Ramadan 982.

Selim I

30 September 1566-21 December 1574.6°
Murad III

8 Ramadan 982 to 4-5 Jumada II 1003.
22 December 1574 to 14-15 February
1595.6!

Mehmet III

16 Jumada II 1003 to 16-17 Rajab 1012.
26 February 1595 to 20-21 December
1603.62
17 Rajab 1012 to 22-23 Dhu ’1-qa‘da 1026.

Ahmad I

21 December 1603 to 21-22 November
1617.63

Mustafa I

23 Dhi ’1-qa‘da 1026-1 Rabi‘T 1027.

(first reign)

22 November 1617-26 February 1618.4

Uthman II

1 Rabi‘I 1027-8 Rajab 1031.
26 February 1618- 19 May 1622.6

Mustafa I
(second reign)

8 Rajab 1031-15 Dha ’1-qa‘da 1032
19 May 1622-10 September 1623.

58 Dates for these rulers based on Danismend, Hammer and Zambaur, 161.
59 Danismend, II, 59, 352. Zambaur places the accession two days earlier and gives no dates for his
death.
60 Danismend, II, 361. Zambaur gives 8 Rabi‘I 974/23 September 1566 for his accession.
61 Danismend, III, 139. Zambaur dates his accession 7 Ramadan.
62 Danismend,

III, 142, 227. Zambaur dates his accession

10 days earlier, on 6 Jumada II/16

February. Hammer, Geschichte, II, 598, places the accession much earlier still, on 18 January

1595:
63 Danismend, III, 229, 267.
64 Danismend, III, 269, 271. Zambaur places the accession a day earlier.

65 Danismend, III, 273, 303. Zambaur places his murder a day earlier.

66 Danismend, III, 305, 323. Zambaur gives his dates as 7 Rajab and 13 Dhi ’1-qa‘da.

569

Annotated tables of rulers

Ottoman

Sultans

(continued)

Murad IV

15 Dhu ’l-ga‘da 1032 to 15-16 Shawwal
1049.

10 September 1623 to 8-9 February 1640.°7
Ibrahim

16 Shawwal 1049-18 Rajab 1058.

9 February 1640-8 August 1648.68
Mehmet IV

18 Rajab 1058-2 Muharram 1099.

8 August 1648-8 November 1687.
Sulaiman II

2 Muharram 1099-25 Ramadan 1102.

8 November 1687-22 June 1691.7°
Ahmad II

25 Ramadan 1102-21 Jumada II 1106.
22 June 1691-6 February 1695.7!

Mustafa II

21 Jumada II 1106-9 Rabi‘II 1115.

6 February 1695-22 August 1703.72

67 Danismend, III, 325, 384. Zambaur places the accession two days earlier.

68 Danismend, III, 387, 409. Zambaur dates his accession much later, on 1 Dha ’1-qa‘da/23 February
1640. Hammer, Histoire, X, 182, places his murder on 28 Rajab/18 August.
69 Danismend, III, 413, 464. Zambaur places the accession later on 1 Sha‘ban/21 August.

70 Danismend, III, 465, 471.
71 Danismend, III, 472, 476. Zambaur dates the accession one day later. Hammer, Histoire, XII,
318, says the coronation took place on 27 Shawwal 1102 which he erroneously equates with 14
July instead of 24 July.

72 Danismend, III, 477. Zambaur gives the rather different dates of 9 Jumada II 1106/25 January
1695 and 23 Sha‘ban 1115/1 January 1704.

570

Annotated tables of rulers

Rulers of Kashghariya

Sultan Sa‘id

920-1 Muharram 940.
1514-23 July 1533.75

‘Abd al-Rashid

1 Muharram 940-?967-85.
23 July 1533-?late 1560-77.76

“Abd al-Karim

2967-85 to ?late 999.
Mate 1560-77 to ?autumn 1591.77

Muhammad

?end 999-71018.
autumn 1591-?1609-10.78

Shuja‘ al-Din Ahmad

1018-1024.
1609-10 to 1615.79

Quraish

1024.
1615.80

75 Akimushkin, "Khronologiya", 157, 159.

76 See Mahmid 1375, 70a, for his accession ‘at the beginning of 940’. There seems to be no
accepted date for his death. Akimushkin, "Khronologiya",

159, places it in 967/1559-60, i.e.,

before 21 September 1560, but this cannot be so for he sent his wife and sons to Badakhshan to
condole upon the execution of Mirza Ibrahim which Hafiz Tanish (6la-63a) and Majma alghara’ib as quoted by Akhmedov

(/storiya, 86) place circa October

1560. Abt ’1-Fadl,

Akbarnama, Ill, text 149-50, tr. by Beveridge 213n. According to Beveridge, Elias and Ross give
973 (1565-6) for “Abd al-Rashid's death. Barto'ld (Sochineniya, VIII, 174) gives the following

possible dates for the same event: 967/1559-60, 973/1565-6, 975/1567-8 and 978/1570-1. And
Mahmud b. Wali (IVAN Uzb 1375, 77b) appears to place it in 985/1577-8.
77 Shah Mahmid, 177. His successor's reign apparently started in 999/1590-1. Pishchulina, "Bahr
al-asrar", 71, gives the rather different dates of 1559-60 to 1592-3 for ‘Abd al-Karim's reign.

78 Shah Mahmid, 177. He reigned 18 years from 999 which means that his reign could have ended
in 1017. But Akimushkin, "Khronologiya", 160, gives his dates as 1000-1018 (1591-2 to 160910), adding that his reign started 3 months after his brother's death. Bartol'd (Sochineniya, VIII,

174) also places his death in 1018/1609-10 as per the nineteenth century author of Ta’rikh-i

amniya ; and Pishchulina ("Bahr al-asrar", 71) gives his dates as 1592-3 to 1609-10.
79 Mahmid 1375, 85b, is explicit about the date of his death and the events that followed, therefore

his version is preferred. Shah Mahmid, 27, 193. Akimushkin, "Khronologiya", 160, gives his
dates as 1018-circa 1028 (1609-10 to 1618-9).

80 Mahmid 1375, 85b, explains that he was killed after a reign of only 9 days.
571

Annotated tables of rulers

Rulers of Khasghariya
(continued)

‘Abd al-Latif/Abaq/Apaq

1024-1036.
1615 to 1626-7.8!

Sultan Ahmad/Fulad

(first reign)
Sultan Mahmid/Qlich

1036-1040.

1626-7 to 1630-1.82
1040-?late 1045.

1630-1 to spring 1636.83

Sultan Ahmad/Fulad

Mate 1045.

(second reign)

spring 1636.84

“Abdallah

Mate 1045-?before Shawwal 1078.

Yulbars

before Shawwal 1078-1079.

?May 1636-?before 27 March 1668.85

?before 27 March 1668- ?early 1669.86

81 Thid., 88a. He was apparently 25 when he died, having reigned 12 years. Bartol'd, Sochineniya,
VIII, 181, quotes contemporary sources which place Apaq's death either in 1036 (1626-7) or 1037
(1627-8). Pishchulina, "Bahr al-asrar", 80, settles for 1627. Akimushkin ("Khronologiya", 160)

prefers the following dates for Apaq's reign: c.1028-c.1040 (1618-9 to 1630-1).
82 Sultan Ahmad's first reign is taken to have ended in or before 1040, because his supporters fled
Kashghariya after he lost his throne and one of them, Mirza Latif Juras, arrived in Balkh in that
year. See further about Sultan Ahmad in Shah Mahmud, 31. Bartol'd, Sochineniya, VIII, 182,

and Akimushkin, "Khronologiya", 160, give 1042/1632-3 for the end of Ahmad's first reign
83 Mahmid 1375, 88b, says Sultan Mahmid reigned chand sal (a few years). He was then ousted

by Sultan Ahmad who retumed to the throne but not for long, for he was threatened by ‘Abdallah
Sultan, son of “Abd al-Rahim, and he had to flee to Balkh where he arrived in early 1046/June
1636. Akimushkin, "Khronologiya", subscribes to this view of events, both here and in Shah

Mahmid, 31-32. However, Bartol'd (Sochineniya, VII, 182) insists that Mahmid ruled two and
a half years, and if that was so, then his reign ended in 1042/1632-3.

84 Mahmid 1375, 88b. Bartol'd, Sochineniya, VIII, 182-3, quotes an anonymous author who places
Ahmad's departure from Kashghariya in 1048/1638-9, and this is also the date favoured by
Akimushkin ("Khronologiya", 160).

85 Saqi (71) says ‘Abdallah was in India on 8 Shawwal 1078/27 March 1668 and met Aurangzib. If
this was the case, then he must have lost his throne and left Kashghariya either in late 1667, or
in early 1668. Akimushkin, "Khronologiya" gives his dates as 1048/1638-9 to 1078/1668.
Bartol'd, Sochineniya, VIII, 185, quotes Ta’rikh i amniye which merely says that ‘Abdallah's

reign lasted 32 years and that he died in 1080/1669-70.
86 Ibid. His reign is said here to have lasted one year, but Akimushkin, "Khronologiya", says he
reigned two years until 1080, when he was killed by the Qalmaq.

S12

Annotated tables of rulers

Rulers of Khasghariya
(continued)

‘Abd al-Latif

Isma ‘il

1079-11 Dhu ’1-ga‘da 1080.
Yearly 1669-2 April 1670.87
11 Dht ’I-qa‘da 1080-71091.

2 April 1670-71680.88
‘Abd al-Rashid

71091-71092.
21680-71681.89

Khwajah Apak?

71092.
71681.

Muhammad Amin

21092-71104.
71681-21692-3.9°

Khwajah Apaq

21104 to 21105.
21692-3 to 71694.91

87 Akimushkin, "Khronologiya". Shah Mahmid, 244.
88 See Akimushkin, "Khronologiya", for his dates. His successor is variously given as ‘Abd alRashid (Akimushkin, "Khronologiya"), ‘Abd al-Rahim (Shah Mahmid, 244) and Khwajah Apak

(Bartol'd, Sochineniya, VIII, 185-6 and Qipchag
accession, says Isma’il came to the throne with
Jakju, but was later toppled by the khwajah with
either 1678, 1679, 1682 or 1683. Qipchaq Khan

Khan, 281b). Bartol'd, who gives no date for his
the support of Khwajah Apaq and the Qalmaq
the help of the overall Qalmagq chief, Galdan, in
calls the khwajah ‘Apak Khwajah Dehbidi’, and

places his takeover in 1101/1689-90.
89 Akimushkin, "Khronologiya", places ‘Abd al-Rashid's accession in 1091/1680, and according to
Galdan's envoys to Irkutsk (Rumyantsev, 407), ‘Abdurshtu’ was deposed ten years before 1691,
i.e., presumably in 1681. According to the sources quoted by Bartol'd (Sochineniya, VIII, 187-8)
‘Abd al-Rashid was first proclaimed in Turfan, then he ousted his brother Muhammad Amin from
Chalish with Galdan's support. He later fell out with Khwajah Apak, was forced to leave the
country and imprisonned by his former allies, the Qalmagq, at which stage the khwajah invited
Muhammad Amin to rule the country.
90 The date of his accession is not known. Bartol'd, Sochineniya, VIII, 187-90, gives no dates for
his reign. Akimushkin, "Khronologiya", says he was killed circa 1104 (between 12 September
1692 and 2 September 1693). The fact that an ambassador from Muhammad Amin had an audience
with Subhan Quli in 1103/September 1691-September 1692 (see chapter 9 above) means that he
must have reigned at least until late 1102/summer 1691.
91 The chronology of the later reigns is the subject of conflicting evidence. The reign of Khwajah
Apak is mentioned by Qipchaq Khan (281b, 285a), by the two sources consulted by Bartol'd
(Sochineniya, VII, 187-9) and by Hambly (137) who calls him Hidayatallah. It is not listed by
Akimuhkin ("Khronologiya"), but he leaves a gap of two years (1104-1106) between the death of
Muhammad Amin and the accession of Muhammad Mu’min and this could well have been filled
by the reigns of Khwajah Apaq and his son Khwajah Yahya for, according to the manuscript from
the Aziatskii muzei quoted by Bartol'd, they added up to just over 2 years (1.5 years + 8 months).
However, Qipchaq Khan appears to allow as many as ten years for Khwajah Apaq's reign (1101-

573

Annotated tables of rulers

Rulers of Khasghariya
(continued)

Khwajah Yahya

71105-71106.
21694-21695.90

Aqbash/Muhammad Mu’min

21106-?
21695-?

Khwajah Daniyal
Sultan Ahmad

Alim Shah 91

However, Qipchaq Khan appears to give ten years on the throne to Khwajah Apaq (1101-1111,
i.c., 1689-90 to 1699-1700) and a few months to his son in 1111. AS for Hambly, he gives

Khwajah Hidayatallah an even longer span of 15 years as ruler (from 1678 to 1693-4).

90 Bartol'd, Sochineniya, VIII, 189, says he was killed by the Qalmaq after a reign of 8 months.
Qipchaq Khan, 285a, merely says that the Qalmaq imprisonned Khwajah Apaq's sons in the
citadel in 1111/1699-1700.
91 Thid., 189-90.

574

Primary sources

Bibliography

Primary Persian, Chinese and Turkish Sources
1 Unpublished

manuscripts

‘Abd al-Hamid Lahauri/Muhammad Warith, Padshahnama, Ethé 329 and Fraser 138.
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615

Index

‘Abbas I, ruler of Iran !

goes back on promise to inhabitants
of Andkhud 117
gracious to Din Muhammad 97
helps Isfandiyar of Khwarazm 160
inadequate artillery 84, 84n
interest in Chinese trade 146
leaves for Khurasan in 1598 96

abolishes taxes 105
accession 56
advice to Wali Muhammad 131
agrees to peace with khanate 118
alleged march on Kabul 173, 173n
alleged reconquest of Herat and
Mashhad 73
annexes Gilan in 1592 69
asks Imam Quli's help against
Ottomans 139
assassination of Murshid Quli 59

Jetters to “Abd al-Mu’min

begins reconquest of Azerbaijan 130
boasts of Tsar's friendship 79-80
campaigns against Ottomans 13940, 142-3
chooses Isfahan as capital 94
death 163, 177
demands Shirwan from Ottomans
79
determined on Balkh accession of
Jahangir Sultan 115
Muhammad Ibrahim 107
embassies from Muscovy 79, 83n,

71-3, 82-

4, 97-8
letters to Ottomans 79, 94, 105
marriage 59
names ‘Ummat Khan to Mashhad 59
negotiates with Balkh amirs 108
offered Astrakhan 141
offers
friendship to Imam Quli 145-6
help to ‘Abd al-Mu’ min 97
help to Nadir Muhammad 167
peace to Baqi Muhammad 116
troops to Rustam M. 141-2
orders reduction of Yalangtiish
stronghold 161
peace with the khanate 162
peace with Turkey confirmed 158
peace with Turkey
in 1590 66-7
in 1618 146
pensions off Rustam M. 162
prepares Balkh campaign 115
prepares to retake Khurasan 96

93-4, 96, 110
embassies from the khanate 93, 94,
96, 128, 132, 167
embassies or letters to the khanate
97, 114, 139, 145-6, 159-60,
162
embassies to India 68, 77,105
embassies to Qul Baba 87, 92, 93,
95, 95n
execution of Bukharans 127
expedition to Qandahar 158, 160,
161
fails to besiege Herat in 1588 59
fails to besiege Mashhad in 1595 84
fails to relieve Mashhad 83
falls ill on way to Khurasan 66, 107
fights Din Muhammad 101
forces Muhammad Quli to fight 53
gives an estate to Rustam M. 161

promises

to help Jahangir Sultan 112
to help Wali Muhammad 130
to march to Khurasan in 1597 88
to reinstate Khwarazmians 75, 82
refuses
peace with ‘Abdallah 94
peace with Turkey 121
to accept Khurasan 96
to help the Ottomans 79
re-inters Tahmasp's alleged bones
88-9
relations with Nar M. 75-6, 113

1 Muslims will be found under their first name. Europeans will be found under
their surnames,
except for their rulers, who are classified by their first name.
M. = Muhammad. M. tax= Muscovite tax.

616

Index

returns Nadir Muhammad's possessions 265
robberies multiply in his reign 440
seizes Nadir M.'s gifts 241-3
urges Bukharan intervention in
Kabul 266, 268
visits Rustam Muhammad 210
warns ‘Abd al-‘Aziz against Shah
Jahan 271
welcomes Imam Quli in 1642 210-1
‘Abbas Mirza (later ‘Abbas I)
captured by Murshid Quli 52, 56
unable to help ‘Ali Quli 56
‘Abbas Sultan, Ashtarkhanid
favoured by Yar Muhammad 112
genealogy 102n
rebels against Baqi Muhammad 112
to Bukhara in 1598 102
‘Abd al-Amin, alleged Janibegid
congratulates Baqi Muhammad 107
death 109
letter to Muhammad Ibrahim 108
proclaimed in Balkh 99
Shah seeks to replace him 107
successes in battle 109
‘Abd al-‘Aziz, ruler of khanate
abandons personal effects in
Khurasan 184
appointed to Kulab in 1625-6 172-3
appointed to Shiburghan 186
asks for Balkh 226
attacked by Anusha 305, 316
attacks Kabul 226
attacks Khurasan 285-7
attacks Subhan Quli in 1670 294
besieges Baqi Yuz in Khujand 227
campaigns to Khurasan
in 1631 to Badghis 179
in 1632 to Maruchaq 179-80
in 1633 to Jam 182
in 1634 184-5
in 1637 191
coinage policy 423, 424
concern for Pazukhins' comfort 295
crushes Qirghiz, aged 11 173
daughters marry Anusha 305, 305n,
318
death 328, 328n
decides to join Alman against
Mughals 245
defeated at Tajarrud in 1634 184
defeated by the Qalmaq in 1643 219
defeats the Qalmaq 245, 269
defeats the Qazags 268
embassies from India 265, 269,
275-6, 283-4

“Abbas I (continued)

seeks help against khanate
in 1591 68
in 1594 77
seizes

Baghdad 144-5
Nur M.'s possessions 113
sends Muhammad Ibrahim

to Marw 106
to Mashhad and Balkh 108
sets off for Khurasan in 1599 106
takes Muhammad Ibrahim to Iran in
1598 105
the Balkh campaign 116-7, 117n
the Khurasan campaign (1592) 71-3
threatens to kill ‘Abdallah 94
ultimatum to ‘Abdallah 70
welcomes Wali Muhammad 129-30
- see also ‘Abbas Mirza
‘Abbas II, ruler of Iran
accepts offer to retake Qandahar 255
accession 210
attitude to trade 441
audience to Balkh envoy 285
captures Qandahar in 1649 258

condoles with ‘Abd al-*Aziz 265

cool to ‘Abd al-‘Aziz's envoy 285
death 286, 286n
demands
Qandahar from India 255
that ‘Abd al-‘ Aziz control his
brother 270
disclaims responsibility for Nadir
Muhammad 241
embassies from Nadir Muhammad
229, 254
embassies to ‘Abd al-‘Aziz 255,
257, 16551685, 170, 271, 277
embassies to Khiva 257, 271, 282
embassies to Nadir Muhammad
DNF 25%,
embassy from Subhan Quli 276
embassy to Subhan Quli 277
generous to Nadir M. in 1651 264
gives nominal help to Nadir M. in
1646 238, 238n
hatred for Uzbegs 285
humiliates Shah Jahan's envoy 254
insulting letter to Aurangzib 289
letters from Shah Jahan 234, 241
letters to Shah Jahan 241, 257
prepares to march on khanate 2856, 286n
refuses
‘Ali Mardan's son to India 254
help to Subhan Quli 276
to fight Abu ’1-Ghazi 171

617

Index

help to Imam Quli 185

“Abd al-‘ Aziz (continued)
embassies from Muscovy and
Siberia 291-8, 316-7
embassies or letters from Iran 255,
265, 266, 268, 277
embassies to Aurangzib 275, 27880, 283, 284, 289, 300, 306,
324, 329

to take Qandahar for Iran 254
on good terms with Abu °1-Ghazi
244, 246
overtures to Mughals? 244, 245
parting-gifts to Shah Sulaiman 328
peace with Subhan Quli 277, 296,
305
prepares to avenge Qasim M. 276
proclaimed in 1645 228
promises release of Muscovites 316
reasons for abdication 326
recalled from Kahmard in 1639 198
releases captives to Pazukhins 296
retakes Bukhara from Anusha 326
returns Abt ’1-Ghazi's relatives 244
returns Dara Shikth's envoy 269
~seeks father's help against Mughals
243, 245
sends armies
against Balkh 255, 263, 270
against Mashhad 285, 286-7,
290
to ambush Aurangzib 248
to seize Hisar from father 232

embassies to Iran 254-5, 268, 269,
270, 273, 277, 282, 285, 286,
289, 290, 300, 324, 325
embassies to Kashghariya 280-1
embassies to Khwarazm 294-5,
318, 324
embassies to Moscow 291, 300-4,
306-8, 312-4
embassies to Shah Jahan 269, 2712 HIS
embassies to Turkey 305?, 324
exploits the one-third rule 422-3
fights
Aurangzib 214
father's troops at Hisar 198-9
Galdan in 1658? 237
Mughals 245-9
Qirghiz in 1675-6 173
Qalmaq 244, 245, 269, 269n
Qazags 246, 268
forced to send away Balkh amirs
228
generous to Daudov 316
gets Qazaq and Khwarazmian help
against Mughals 246
harasses retreating Mughals 253
helps
Khwarazmian pretender? 325-6
Mughal envoy Jan Nathar 256
Qazaqs against Qalmaq 244
Subhan Quli in 1671 305
to capture Qandahar? 258
his bodyguard 303
his envoy kidnaps Khwarazmian
ambassador 273
in peril 220, 228, 272
intercepts Mughal supplies 246
interest in religion 277
investigates Bashkirian arrival 297
kept near father 186, 213-4
leaves for Mecca 327
letters to tsar 301, 307, 324
marries Anusha's daughter 305n
marries Qazaq princess 214
named to Khutlan 172
named to Samarqand in 1641 213
negotiates with Aurangzib 249
offers
daughter to Anusha 318

towards Kabul in 1652 229
sends Qasim M. to Qandahar? 268n

sends shopping-list to Khwajah
Ibrahim 222
sent
against Shah Jahan in 1639 196
to deal with Baqi Yuz 226
to help the Qazaqs in 1643 220
to seize Hisar in 1641 207
tries to

foster trade 423
have Subhan Quli killed 260

topple Abt al-Ghazi 270
weeps for father 265
welcomed in Iran 327
wife sent back from Balkh 240n,
244-5
“Abd al-*Aziz, son of ‘Ubaidallah I 8
‘Abd al-Ghaffar, Qaraqalpaq leader 122n
‘Abd al-Ghaffar, son of Baba Sultan
put to death in 1583 44
returned to father 38
submits to ‘Abdallah in 1580 37

‘Abd al-Ghafur, Balkh envoy

192-3,

194n

‘Abd al-Karim, Kashghariyan Prince
named to Kishm 135, 135n
‘Abd al-Karim, ruler of Kashghariya
congratulates ‘Abdallah
on capture of Herat 62
on conquest of Badakhshan 48-9
refuses to extradite Mu’min S. 52

618

Index
‘Abd al-Karim (continued)
struggle with Quraish S. 62

Burhan Sultan in 1552 10
Buzah Khwar 32
Mirza Sulaiman in 1560 15

‘Abd al-Karim, Suyanchid
confirmed in Sairam in 1578 29-30
loses wife to a Qazaq in 1579 31

defends Samarqand against khan 10
demands
attack on Astrakhan 65
Buzah Khwar's surrender 35
opening of hajj route 19
embassies from Badakhshan 28,
34, 39, 45, 48
embassies from Moscow 13-4, 25,
30 SHO)
embassies or letters received from
India 27-8, 53, 54-5, 89-90

“Abdallah II, ruler of khanate 508

abandons Mashhad siege 59
abortive campaigns to Khurasan in
L552 Solel 5s 16
accession 46
:
accused of cruelty 58
addresses Tsar incorrectly 60-1
agreement on Indian frontier 57-8,
77, 198
alleged execution of Khwarazmian
Princes 75
angry with Tawakkul 45
annexes Marw in 1592 69-70
appointed to Bukhara in 1550 8,9
appoints
Qu! Baba to Herat 58
son to Badakhshan 58
son to Balkh 42
asks Khwajah Sa‘d's blessing 28
attitude towards trade 414, 415,
418-9
besieges Balkh in 1572-3 24
besieges Marw in 1567 19
builds dam near Balkh 42
builds estate for Jaibari 14
campaigns against Baba Sultan
in 1578 28-31
in 1579 31-3
in 1580 34-7
in 1582 39-42
campaigns to Khurasan 19, 20, 53,
56-9, (86)
captures Bukhara in 1557 11
captures Herat in 1588 58
chases Baba from Zamin 29
coinage reform 353-5
colludes with Sultan? 51
concerned with taxation 50, 52
congratulates
Baba Sultan on eliminating Qazaq
Princes 36
Mirza Sulaiman on defeat of
Shahrukh 34
conquers Badakhshan 28, 47
contact with Kuchum 80, 86, 90,
90n, 91
curious about Muscovy 13
death 95
decides to conquer Sistan 87
defeated by Baba Sultan 10
defeats
Baba Sultan 24, 26, 29, 34

Khurasan

44, 48, 51-2

Turkey 26, 31, 51, 73, 78-9, 89
embassies or letters to India 24, 278, 30, 50, 53-4, 62, 67, 78
embassies or letters to Turkey 19,
26, 43, 51, 61, 65, 78, 79, 94
embassies to Iran 93, 94
embassies to Moscow 12, 13, 18,
19, 43-7, 50-1, 60-1, 68, 87,
91
embassy to Kashghariya in 1586 52
encourages agriculture 418k, 418n
estranged from son 77-8, 87, 91-2
gifts to
amirs 43
Kuchum 422
Juibari 9, 25, 25n, 43, 46, 47,
49, 62
Tawakkul 38-9, 41
given
Bukhara in 1555 10
Ghujduwan in 1556 10
has father proclaimed 16
his ambassadors detained in
Muscovy in 1569 19
his armies fight Qazags in 1584 80
Khwarazmian campaigns
in 1576 27
in 1592 70
in 1593 73, 74
in 1595 86
lets Baba Sultan keep Tashkent 32
magnanimous to enemies 26, 29,
31, 34, 35, 39, 41, 42
marches
against Tawakkul 95

to help Nur Muhammad 69-70
to Marw in 1595 84
marries 14, 14n
mission to China? 53

offers villages to Qazaqs 32
orders execution of opponents 22,
25, 30, 41, 275

619

Index

cruelty 19, 63-4, 88, 88n
death 98
defeated in Badakhshan in 1590 67
defeats Mirza Sulaiman in 1585 49
demands
Badakhshani refugees 67, 90
father's abdication 77-8
disappears during campaign 40
entertains Mughal envoy 57
envoy to Muscovy in 1589 60
expels Yar Muhammad Khan 100
fails to take Kulab 47
fails to take Nishapur 63
first campaign 33
his son too young for the throne 99
imprisons Jani Muhammad 99
kills Qul Baba 96
letters to Shah ‘Abbas 70-3, 82-4
marches against Hazara Sultan 96
massacres Isfara'in defenders 69
punishes Bayat tribe 69
prepares to march on Khurasan in
1598 96
reassures ‘Abbas about Qazaqs 72
receives alleged support from Nur
Muhammad 64
revenge on the Mashhadis 63-4
sends raiders to Astarabad 87
sent against Mashhad 63
threatens Nur Muhammad 70
tries to seize father 92
warns against Khwarazmians 71

“Abdallah IT (continued)

pledges support to ‘Ali Quli 44
receives gifts from
Iran in 1563 17
Tsar in 1583. 43
relations with Noghays 39, 68, 78
returns daughter to Baba Sultan 33
takes
Bukhara in 1557 11
Kasbi in 1552 9
Qarshi in 1558 11
Sabran 41
Samargand 11, 22, 28
Tirmidh 24
the Kashghariyan campaign 80-2
welcomes Jenkinson 13
“Abdallah, ruler of Kashghariya
alliance with the Qazaq Jahangir 281
attacks Andijan 268
attacks Bolor and Badakhshan 280
embassies to the khanate 281
fights the Qirghiz 280
takes over Kashghariya 189
“Abdallah Sultan, Iranian governor 344
‘Abdallah Sultan, Janibegid
allowed to retain Hisar 112
is not Muhammad Salim's son 123n
rebels against Wali Muhammad 123
supports Muhammad Ibrahim 111
“Abdallah Sultan, son of Baqi M. 174-5
“Abdallah Bik Qipchaq
attacks Balkh in 1613 136, 138
takes prisoners 137
“Abd al-Latif, brother of ‘Abdallah II
death 43
“Abd al-Latif, ruler of khanate
appoints Yar M. to Bukhara 8

“Abd al-Quddis - see Diistim
‘Abd al-Rahim, Bukharan envoy

sent to Akbar 27-8
‘Abd al-Rahim, Kashghariyan Prince
sent against Khudabanda in 1595 82
‘Abd al-Rahim Khwajah Jiibari
death 175
expelled to India 135
gifts from India 163
his ancestors 170, 170n
letter from Shah? 163, 163n
mission to Jahangir 170-1, 170n
negotiates with Shah 160
rallies to Wali Muhammad 132

death 9, 9n
‘Abd al-Latif, son of Baba Sultan 41
Abd al-Manan, Balkh envoy
embassy to Istanbul 257
‘Abd al-Mu’ min, ruler of khanate
abandons siege of Isfara’in 84
abortive embassy to Akbar 67
accession 95
accused of massacre 58
accuses Qul Baba 92
action against Qazaqs in 1594? 80
appointed to Badakhshan 58
appointed to Balkh 42
birth 22
boasts of successes to Ottomans 64
chases Badakhshan pretender to
Kabul in 1594 78
completes Khwarazmian conquest
in 1593 675-6
conflict with father 91-2

‘Abd al-Rahman, khanate official
writes to Aurangzib 283

‘Abd al-Rahman Kinkas, Balkh envoy
detained in Kabul 194
‘Abd al-Rahman Qanghan, khanate amir
138n
‘Abd al-Rahman, son of Nadir M.
appointed to Shiburghan 213n
exiled to Bengal 267n
flees to India 263-4, 263n
returns to the khanate 260-1

620

Index

embassy to China 288
gifts from Ablin 273
on pilgrimage to Tibet 287
Seitkul Ablin stays with him 269
war with Daichin 291
Abreim Azizov 391
Abudu Shukur, Bukharan amir?
fights Galdan 274, 274n
Abu ’1-Fadl, Mughal courtier
writes to “Abdallah 78
Abt ’1-Ghazi, ruler of Knwarazm
arranges killing of Turkmen 242
arrests Muscovites in 1646 267,
270, 477, 501
attacks khanate 270, 270n, 272,
273, 274
blockades Khiva 202
captured and sent to Iran 172
death 282
defeats Qasim Muhammad? 223
demands gifts from Khokhlov 150
embassies to Iran 256, 273, 282
fails to topple Isfandiyar 172
falls out with Isfandiyar 167
flees to the khanate 156, 172
flees to the Qazags 168
friendly with ‘Abd al-‘Aziz 244,
246
kept in khanate against his will 160
offers help against Balkh 244
offers peace to the khanate 281
on events following Isfandiyar's
death 217
on fall of Khwarazm 217
pension from Iran 290n
related to Subhan Quli 270
sent back to Khwarazm in 1623-4
164, 164n
takes Khwarazm 244
the Karmina campaign 272
warns ‘Abd al-‘Aziz against the
Qalmaq 268
Abu ’1-Hasan of Golconda 345
Abuli Sultan, Qazaq

“Abd al-Rahman (continued)

sent gifts by Emperor, 262, 265
taken to India by the Mughals 240
writes to Shah Jahan 262
‘Abd al-Rahman Ushin, Bukharan amir
campaigns in Badakhshan 125
death in 1645 231
defeats ‘Abdallah Bik Qipchaq 138
dismissed for misconduct 186
defends Balkh in 1613 138
fights Mirza Hasan 125
fights the Qazaqs in 1638 191
helps Jahangir Qazaq in 1643 220
in Kulab with ‘Abd al-‘Aziz 173

marches to Ubeh 158, 159n
mission to Imam Quli in 1635

185
named diwanbegi 207, 207n
negotiates with Baqi Yuz 226
sent against
Shah Jahan in 1639 196, 198
the Qazags in 1638 192
the Qirghiz in 1642 214, 214n

sent to retake Kahmard in 1645 231
sent to take Hisar in 1641 207
successful in Khurasan in 1634 185
surrenders Tashkent funds to ‘Abd
al-‘Aziz 227
takes part in Maruchaq siege 180
threatened with hanging 228
‘Abd al-Rashid, ruler of Kashghariya
condoles with Mirza Sulaiman 81
gives troops to Sultan Sa‘id 12, 41
‘Abd al-Samad Bi, Bukharan amir
appointed to Shiburghan 43
ataliq to Muhammad Mu’ min 30, 35
besieged in Andijan 31
chases Badakhshani mirzas 47-8
kills ‘Abd al-Mu’min 98
‘Abd al-Sattar, son of Baba Sultan
put to death in 1582 41

‘Abd al-Wasi‘ Bi, Bukharan amir
death 103
helps Tawakkul against khanate 102
recognises Pir Muhammad II 99
‘Abd al-Wasi’ Bi, friend of Imam Quli
175-6
‘Abdi Khwajah Juibari,
champions Prince Salim 121
exiled in 1604 121
helps Baqi M. get Tirmidh 111
plots against Baqi M. 120-1
related to Baqi M. 111
supports Baqi M. 103

attacked by Tursin and Ishim

169

attacks Imam Quli's camp 136
attacks Tashkent 136, 178
besieged in Turkestan in 1613 137
death 178
defeated in 1612 135
flees to Kashghariya in 1628 174
helps
Imam Quli in-1624

166

Ishim Sultan in 1626-7 172

‘Abid Khwajah, Mughal envoy

lets down Wali Muhammad

mission to Bukhara 276
Ablai, Khoshout Qalmaq
crushed by Ayuka 296, 296n

seizes Tashkent

621

125, 174

133

Index

Abu ’1-Khair Khan
his kingdom 2

Ahdad bad Nahad, Afghan rebel
rebellion and death 169

the Qazaqs refuse him as ruler 20

Ahmad IJ, Ottoman ruler

Abilkhairids 14, 20
Abu ’1-Khair, son of Jawanmard
attacks Shahr-i sabz in 1567 21
given Samarqand by ‘Abdallah 28
given Shahrisabz by Baba Sultan 23
put to death 30
sides with ‘Abdallah 26, 28
Abt ’1-Mansir, son of Subhan Quli
death 330, 330n
kills brother 329-30, 330n
takes over Balkh 329

offers peace to Iran 121
Ahmad II, Ottoman ruler
sends mission to Bukhara 347
suggests joint war on Iran 348
Ahmad ‘Ali, Bukharan envoy
despatched to India 57
dies in India 62
Ahmad Girei, Kuchumite Prince 50n
Akbar, Mughal Emperor
angry at capture of Garmsir 121
annexes Qandahar 77
anxious to conquer khanate 16
attitude towards trade 444-5, 448
audience to Mir Quraish 54
avenges Badi‘ u’l-Zaman 119
challenged by M. Hakim 39
champions Badi‘ u’l-Zaman 117-8
claims Ahmadnagar conquest 89
claims to champion Islam 30-1, 55
din-i ilahi 55
drowning of ambassador 67
embassies from Iran 68, 77, 94,
105
embassies to ‘Abdallah 27, 53, 56,
63, 89
fights the Tariki 62, 88
forgives Salim 121
helps Badakhshani impostor in 1589
67

Abi ’1-Muhammad, Bukharan amir
governor of Mashhad 100
Abi ’l-Muhammad of Marw
adopts Nur Muhammad 64, 70

visits khanate in 1577 27
Abu ’1-Muhammad, son of Kildi M.
disciplined in 1613 121

rebels in 1604 106
Abu Sa‘id of Kashghariya
marries Badakhshani princess 48
rebels against ruler in 1594 81
sent to Badakhshan 48
welcomed in khanate 135
Abushakovy A., Bukharan trader 433
Abt Talib, Iranian Prince 59
Access to Moscow
forbidden 489-90, 492, 493, 494
only for major goods 469, 470,
471, 472
permitted to Astrakhan residents
494
permitted to Bukharans 488

improves road to Kabul 50, 50n
intercedes for Shahrukh 55
keen to attack the khanate, 104, 121
letters to ‘Abdallah 27-8, 30-1, 546, 78, 89-90
refuses
help to Iran against khanate 68
help to Sistanis 88
to attack Iran 27-8, 30, 55
to attack khanate 95, 104
rejects charges of heresy 55
religious megalomaniac 35, 55
rumoured attack on khanate 59
sabre sent to Imam Quli 175
seizes Qandahar 77
sends troops
to Kabul in 1585 50
to Qandahar in 1592 68
Stays in Punjab from 1589 62
supports Badakhshani impostor
in 1589 67
in 1599 105
threatens Ghazni 66
unpopular with Muslims 39
welcomes ‘Abdi Khwajah 120

Adam Bik, Bukharan envoy
first mission to Muscovy 147-8
gifts for the Tsar 157
leaves Moscow for Bukhara 149
robbed by the Turkmen 149-50
second mission to Muscovy 156
tries to seize gerfalcons 152
welcomed in Moscow 148

Adil Bi Ming, ataliq in Balkh
complaints against him 359, 359n
flees to Shiburghan 360

rebels 359

Adil Sultan, Suyinchid 56n
Adina Muhammad Bi Ming, Bukharan
arrested by Sadiq Muhammad 331
in charge of Bala Murghab 354
Adnash, Bukharan envoy
sent to Muscovy 419
Afghan Muhammad, Khwarazmian
letter from Yishan 217
sent to Muscovy 157

622

Index
Akbazar, Khoshout envoy 287
alacha - see pestred'
Aleksei, ruler of Muscovy
accession 242
arrests Central Asian traders 478
asks Shah to help Daudov 311
coinage policy 291, 291n, 484-5
concessions to Bukharans in 1671
303, 309
copper riots 485
demands fairness for traders 480
embassies from the khanate 291,
300-4, 306-8, 312-4
embassies to the khanate 204-5,
215-22, 242-56, 291-8, 312-9
forbids Noghay relations with
Bukhara 268, 282
further concessions to Bukharan
traders 309
keen on Indian trade 308
sells tobacco through agents 511
suspicious of foreign traders 488,
490
trade policy 477-90
wants compensation for traders 267
war in Poland 282
writes to Chinese Emperor 274
‘Ali Bahadur Hajji, Bukharan envoy
sentto Turkey in 1575 36
“Ali Kak grapes 2
‘Ali Khan Geraili, Iranian
death 93
followers killed by Bukharans 87
related to Safavids 71
Shah intent on cowing him 85

Shah warned against him 71
“Ali Mardan, Irano-Mughal amir
appointed to Kabul in 1644 229
arrives in Balkh 236, 245
fearful of Shah 193n
gives Qandahar to Mughals 193
helps entertain Bukharan envoy 200
orders survey of Badakhshan route
PB
prepares to
fight the khanate in 1642 210
help Nadir M. in 1648 255
returns to India from Balkh 245n
sends army to Kahmard in 1645
229
sent to Kabul 173, 234
son requested from Iran 254
Alimko Suleimanov of Tobol'sk
S12 13
‘Ali Murad chihra aqasi, Balkh envoy
embassy to Muscovy 319, 322-3,
495

journey 319, 322
gifts received 323
robbed? 320n, 322, 323, 323n
stay in Moscow 323
“Ali Murad, khanate official
puts Abuli to death 170
“Ali Quli Khan Shami, Iranian amir
appeals to “Abdallah 38-41, 44,
44n, 48, 51-2
condoles with ‘Abdallah 45
conflict with Murtada Quli 43
conflict with Shah 44
death 58
decides to resist ‘Abdallah 56
promises to serve ‘Abdallah 52
sues for peace 58, 58n
‘Ali Quli Saruqchi, Khurasan envoy
sent to khanate 52
“Ali Rida, eighth Imam
gifts to his tomb 18
massacre by his tomb 64
“Ali Sultan, Khwarazmian Prince

fails to attack Mashhad in 1563 18
hostile to Iran 14
raids Khurasan 17
Allah Birdi Bi, Bukharan amir
captures khanate rebels 352
leads army against Anusha 335
Allah Quli, Iranian official
reports on khanate 246, 247, 253
Allah Quli Khan, governor of Marw
prevents Turkmen return 256
Alman
abandon siege of Kabul in 1628 174
attack Ghazni in 1652 266-7
attack India 166-7
attack Mashhad in 1647-8 254
definition 166, 174
fight ‘Abd al-‘Aziz 317
flee to Khanabad 400n
harass Mughals occupiers 196, 240,
245, 246, 246n, 247, 248.
kill Safi 232
numbers 232n
raid the khanate 200

ruin crops 250
sell horses to Mughals 249
stop travel between Balkh and
Bukhara 255
Altan Khans

allied with Ishim Sultan 168
at war with Qalmaq 165
territory 165, 412
Aman Gildei Abyz, Bukharan cleric
represents Bukhara in Muscovy 157
detained in Muscovy 165
ambar (ambary) 461, 488

Index
ambarnaya ,ambarnoe, M. tax

lukewarm about releasing Russian
captives 293
marries daughter of

461,

461n, 465
- see also poambarnoe
ambarshchina, M. tax 480
aambassadors' allowance in khanate

‘Abd al-‘Aziz 305, 305n, 318
of Khwajah Zaccharias 335
on good terms with ‘Abd al-‘Aziz
293, 294-5, 295n, 308, 318-9
seizes gerfalcons 316, 320-1

152, 215, 215n, 216, 218, 294
mbassadors' allowance in Muscovy and
Siberia 195, 212, 224, 224n, 225,

294n, 300-1, 306, 306n, 322n
Amin Bahadur, Khwarazmian envoy
arrival in Astrakhan in 1643 225
carries Bukharan goods 437
detained at Astrakhan 242
detained at the Qalmaq 243
dismissal requested 223
exempted from Muscovite dues 225
on the Khiva-Karagan journey 392
on Muscovites traders in khanate
500
Amir Khan, C in C of Khurasan
appointed 182
death 190-1
success against ‘Abd al-‘Aziz 184
Andi Bek, Iranian envoy 470
Andijan
appointment of
Fadil Khwajah 178

sends Bukharan goods to Tsar 372

suggests Manqishlaq fort 325, 325n
171-2,

Apak Khan of Kashghariya
172n

Aqbash Khan, Kashghariyan ruler 348
“Arab Muhammad I, Khwarazmian ruler
asked to hetp Tikhanov 141
embassy to Noghays 142
flees before ‘Abdallah in 1595 86
put to death 160
son-in-law of Imam Quli 142
toppled by his sons 156
unable to protect Khokhlov 150
‘Arab Muhammad II Khwarazmian ruler
asks tsar's protection 361

Arang, Khwarazmian ruler
accession 343, 343n, 344n
attacks the khanate in 1688 344
death 352-3
defeated by Mahmid Bi 351
interferes with Bukharo-Muscovite
trade 349, 437
invades the khanate in 1694 351
replaced by impostor? 353, 353n
arba 433

Muhammad Mu’min 30
Muhammad Yar 178

appoints own governor 214
attacked by Kashghariyans 268
attacked by Muhammad Mu’min 44
Baba Sultan's defeat 26
death of Sultan Ahmad 189
rebellions 137, 187
siege 3
Andkhud
inhabitants taken into slavery 117
Muhammad Salim appointed 116
siege by Shah‘Abbas 116
ansyr, measure of weight 371
Anusha, Khwarazmian ruler
alleged exploits at Karmina 272
attacks ‘Abd al-‘Aziz 294-5, 305,
316, 325-6
attacks Iran 285, 286, 290
attacks Subhan Quli 294-5, 318-9,
331-6, 339
blinded and deposed 339, 340n
captures
Bukhara in 1681 325, 326, 326n
Mashhad in 1681 325
Samarqand in 1684 335
death 340
embassy to India 289
fails to take Qarshi 335

argomack (argamak) 442-3

Arkhangel'sk 481, 487, 499
Armenian, Armenians

banned from Moscow 490, 494
becomes Muscovite envoy to
Bukhara 308
in Astrakhan 460, 491, 491n
killed in Balkh 305
monopolise silk trade 292, 435,
447, 488
armyak 433
arroba 453, 453n
arshinnoe, M. tax 467, 480
Arslan Bik, Mughal, mission to Iran
241
Arslan yasawul, Balkh envoy 260
Asaf Khan, Mughal C in C
plots attack on khanate 200, 200n
Asalat Khan, Mughal amir
fights Nadir Muhammad 237
left in joint charge of Balkh 239
reconnaissance mission 233
sent to reinforce Kahmard 231

624

Index

Ashraf, Khwarazmian Prince
letter to Afghan Muhammad 217
obtains slaves from Muscovy 226
taken to Bukhara 218
Ashtarkhanids
origin 100
ass's load 251-2, 436
Astrakhan
access requested by ‘Abdallah 18
annexed by tsar 12
gostinyi dvor
of 1615 460
of 1672 488, 490
of 1685 492, 496
Ottoman attack 23
pilgrims’ route blocked in 1568 19
rules applying to resident Bukharans
484, 487, 490, 494, 496
restrictions on immigration 491, 492
security checks imposed on traders
473, 491
Ata Allah, Mughal envoy 251

embassies or messages to Subhan
Quli 283-4, 299-300, 340, 341,
345
embassy from Anusha 289
fights Uzbegs near Aqcha 249
hopes to conquer the khanate 360
negotiates with Nadir Muhammad
247, 250-2
offers help to ‘Abd al-‘Aziz against
brother 276
puts Shambhuji to death 346
retreats from Balkh 252-3
refuses negotiations outside Balkh
250

route to Balkh in 1647 345
Shah asks help against Balkh? 286n
sends
army to frontier of khanate 330
money to Gur-i Amir 342
Yaka Taz to Balkh 299
sent
to Balkh 245-6, 246n
to Qandahar 258, 259n, 260-1,
265-6
suggests retreat from Balkh 215
Avril, French traveller 401, 408, 409

Atesh Qalmaq, Balkh envoy
despatched to India 261, 262
receives Balkh from Mughals 252
sent back from India 269
atlas 372
‘Aud, Bukharan envoy to Iran 270
audiences of ambassadors 57, 152,
155, 224, 280, 285, 288, 295
Aurangzib
and Khwajah ‘Abd al-Ghaffar 254,
267, 283n
annexes Bijapur and Golconda 345

Ay Khanum
her husbands 130
in Bukhara 132, 132n
marries Imam Quli 130
to Chahar Jay with Wali M. 129
to Mecca with Imam Quli? 208-9

Ay Muhammad Sultan, Bukharan
takes Ottoman request for help 170
Ayuka, Torgout Qalmaq
attacks Khiva 340, 344
crushes Ablai 296, 296n
embassy to Subhan Quli 340
provides escort for Muscovites 315
swears fealty to the Tsar 316-7
wooed by Muscovy and Poland 340
Baba Sultan, brother of Buzah Khwar
captured 42n
Baba Sultan, Khwarazmian Prince
attacks Bukharan pilgrims 70
death at Hazarasp in 1595 86
refused access to Wazir 75
Baba Sultan, son of Nauriz Ahmad
agreement with Qazaqs 31
a Qazaq in his likeness chosen as
ruler 56
asks for Andijan in 1579 33
asks forgiveness and pledges loyalty
S182, Boy 50,51 38
confirmed in Turkestan in 1578 31
attacks Dabusi in 1569 22
attacks Karmina in 1570 23

asks Subhan Quli to attack Iran 341

asks to return to India 256
attitude towards trade 378-9
back in Kabul 253
battle at Darra-yi Gaz 245
besieges Qandahar 260-1, 266-7
complains about Bukharan embassy
of 1658 275
considers attack on khanate 325
coronation 275
defeats brothers 275
demands return of Qandahar 285
discriminates against Hindus 299
embassies from ‘Abd al-‘Aziz 275,
278-80, 283, 284, 289, 300,
306, 324, 329
embassies from Subhan Quli 278,
281, 283, 284, 289, 298, 299,
323-3, 325, 330, 345, 346, 360
embassies or messages to ‘Abd al‘Aziz 275, 276, 283-4

625

Index
escorts Aurangzib to Balkh 247n,

Baba Sultan (continued)

248
fights Qutluq Muhammad 249
left in joint charge of Balkh 279
welcomes Qasim M. to Balkh 252
Bahram, son of Nadir Muhammad
at odds with ataliq 230
besieged in Hisar 230
falls out with Bagi Yuz 226
named to Tashkent 213, 221
receives gifts on father's death 265
sent to propitiate Murad Bakhsh 236
sent to retake Hisar 232
taken to India 240
unwilling to leave India 260
Baikov, Muscovite envoy
mission to China 169, 173, 174
Bailo, Venetian envoy 118
Baiseit Mirza, Siberian Muslim
plea to Tsar about trade 506
Baisungar, Mughal pretender
seeks support in Balkh 181, 181n
baj, khanate tax 89, 414, 414n
Bala Murghab
attacked by Bukharans in 1631 178
falls to Subhan Quli's troops in 1688
344, 344n, 345, 346
returned to Iran in 1623-4 163
taken by Bukhara 162, 162n
ball-tobacco 534-5, 540
- see also tobacco and shar’
Balkh amirs
ask for Muhammad Muqim 353
defeated by Jahangir Sultan 126
fight Anusha 334
impose conditions on Muhammad
Ibrahim 108
reject Shah's approaches 115
take Muhammad Salim to Balkh 107
Balkh governors
Din Muhammad 20
Jadim Bi? 342
Mahmid Bi 350
Muhammad Jan Bi Yuz 339
Nazar Bi Naiman 25
Salih Khwajah 355
Bamian
razed by Mughals in 1629 176
seized by Yalangtish in 1628 174
threatened by Mughals in 1639 197
Banu Begum, see Nadir M.'s mother
Banu-yi ‘Uzma, Regent of Balkh
invites M. Ibrahim to Balkh 108
offers ‘Abd al-Amin as ruler 99
sent off to Mecca 109

death 41
defeated by ‘Abdallah's army 24,
26, 29, 34
defeats ‘Abdallah in 1554 10
defeats Shighai Khan 36
escapes to the Noghays in 1582 41
execution of Khusrau Sultan 21
execution of Qazaq Princes 36
fights the Qazags in 1556-60? 20
flees before ‘Abdallah 21, 29, 35,
37, 38, 40
given Shahr-i sabz 22
gives Qazaqs Turkestan and Sabran
33
makes a bid for Tashkent 31
offers peace to ‘Abdallah 34, 35
sheltered by Noghays 411
threatens
Bukhara in 1568 21
Samarqand in 1575 26
Babur, Timurid Prince
loses Samargand to Shaibani 3
related to Mirza Sulaiman 15n
Badakhshan
attacked by Mughals in 1627-8 173
conquered by “Abdallah 57
friendly towards ‘Abdallah 34, 39
Mahmud Bi's campaign 352
Mughals decide conquest 200
rebellions
of 1587 57
of 1589 and 1599 68, 105
of 1601 115, 117-8
of 1641? 205, 205n
of Mirza Hasan c.1606 124, 125
of Shah Nizam in 1588 49
Shahrukh attacks khanate 32
taken over by Badi‘ u’l-Zaman 115
taken over by impostor 105
Badi‘ mir akhur, khanate official
persecuted by Sadiq M. 331
Badi‘ u’l-Zaman, nephew of M. Hakim
avenged by Akbar 119
executed 118
helped by Akbar 115n
seizes Badakhshan 115
bad'yan 382, 459, 514, 515
Baghdad
attacked by Ottomans 170, 177,
191, 193n, 194
lost by Iran 199
Shah Safi marches there 194
taken by ‘Abbas I 163, 163n
visited by Imam Quli 211
Bahadur Khan, Ahmadnagar ruler 89
Bahadur Khan, Mughal amir

baqawul Ibrahim, Balkh envoy
mission to India in 1640 201

626

Index

Baqi ‘Aziz, governor of Bukhara

155

attacks Turkestan 219, 219n
captures Qazaq tribes 220
conflict with Jahangir Qazaq 21920, 220n, 244
founds Kubak Sary 411-2
on good terms with Imam Quli 203
threatens khanate 220

Baqi Bi Ushun, Bukharan amir 125
Baqi Muhammad, ruler of khanate
accession 120
achievements under ‘Abdallah 102
appointed to Samarqand 103
asks grandfather to abdicate 112
attacks Khurasan in 1604? 120
coinage 419
conflict with Pir M. II 106-7
contact with Kuchumites 110, 110n
death 122
death of father 119, 120
detains Iranian ambassador 115
fights in Sistan 76, 87
flight from Pul-i Salar 102
forgives “Ubaidallah Sultan 112

Bayat Qara, Alchin chief
killed by Sadiq Muhammad 331
Bayazid, Ottoman Prince
sheltered by Shah Tahmasp 18
Bayazid, Ottoman ruler
sent Shaibani's skull 3
Behbud Bahadur, Bukharan envoy

detained in Khiva 204
in Astrakhan in 1641 212
sent to Muscovy 202
Behbud, Bukharan envoy
mission to Muscovy 187
Bektash Khan, governor of Marv 114
berkovets, measure of weight 466
Bik Muhammad, Bukharan amir
rebels against Subhan Quli 349
refuses to submit 350
Bik Ughli Kinkas, Bukharan amir
appointed to Tashkent in 1636 189
ataliq to ‘Abd al-‘Aziz 213, 230
attacked by Baqi Yuz 227
execution of Kafsh Qalmaq 259
fights Aurangzib 249
frees ‘Abd al-Rahman 228
marches to Darra-yi Gaz 248
mission to Aurangzib 249
pledges allegiance to Nadir M. 179
Biksi Bi Durman, Balkh envoy
mission to India 271
Bistam
attacked by Bukharans 82, 93
Shah ‘Abbas stays there in 1595 83
béfetas 457
Bogdanov Martin, tobacco monopolist
525-7, 528, 529
Bogdanov Zakharii, Muscovite envoy
delayed in Khwarazm? 26
sent to Bukhara in 1574 25
Boghar |
Boris Godunov, ruler of Muscovy
alleges success against Bukhara 1
calls ‘Abdallah Sultan's henchman
80
completes Siberian conquest 503
intercedes for Muhammad ‘Ali 61
restricts Bukharan trade 506
returns Bukharan envoy 110, 110n
stops Noghay-Bukharan links 111
suspicious of Bukharans 505
urges Shah to attack Bukhara 79-80

indirect overtures to Iran 114, 118

letters to Shah ‘Abbas

115, 116

marches against
Kildi Muhammad's son 122
Muhammad Ibrahim 111

offers
help against Tawakkul 102
peace on Khurasan frontier 118
plot against him 120
prepares to attack Khurasan 119
proclaims father 113
proclaims grandfather 107
puts to death “Abd al-Wasi‘ Bi 103
regains Badakhshan 118
seeks Ottoman help against Iran 118
sends
brother to fight Kildi M. 111
envoy to Moscow

110, 110n,

419
takes over Bukhara 107
Baqi Sultan, son of Turstn, Qazaq
death 192
rebels against Bukhara 192
Baqi (Bi) Yuz, Bukharan amir
attacks Kafsh Qalmaq 227
besieges Nadir Muhammad 255-6
dispute with Bahram Sultan 226
goes over to ‘Abd al‘Aziz 229
in charge of Tashkent 213, 221
rallies to Nadir Muhammad 207
seizes Sanjar Sultan 226
Bashkirs 427, 428, 517, 532
Bassa, Venetian envoy 61
batman
Bukharan 218, 218n, 302n, 436,
436n
Khivan 436, 436n
‘shah's’ 251, 251n, 252n
Batur, Sungar kuntaidzhi
accession 203

627

Index

tax paid in 1609 507
tax rate in 1693 523
welcomed 86-7, 503, 504, 521
Buraq Khan, see Nauruz Ahmad
Burhan Sultan, Abulkhairid

Boris Godunov (continued)

wants anti-Bukhara alliance 80, 110
Budagh Khan Chegani
defeated at Khabishan 64
escorts Muhammad Ibrahim 108
named to Mashhad 59
plans to seize Mashhad 63
Budagh Khan Qajar, governor of Marv
embassies to Balkh 177
Buidash, Qazaq
killed at Sairam 21, 21n
Buhung Sultan, brother of Abuli Qazaq
lets down Wali Muhammad 133
Bukhara
appearance in 1558 5-6
besieged in 1559 15
capital of “Ubaidallah 9
captured by Anusha 325, 326
monuments 1
offered to ‘Abdallah 9, 10, 10n
offered to Ottomans 11n
taken by “Abdallah 11
threatened by Baba Sultan 21
Bukharan agents of Qalmaq 430-1, 5101 STE BUI SVAN SIO Sh
Bukharan amirs
accept Nadir Muhammad 207
attack Khurasan jointly with Anusha
284-5, 285-6
defeated in Khurasan in 1607 207
flee to Balkhin 1599 107
plot against Wali Muhammad 128
proclaim ‘Abd al-‘Aziz 228
ultimatum to ‘Abd al-‘Aziz 227
Bukharan captives sent back
by ‘Abbas I 146
by Safil 177, 179
Bukharan embassies to China 53, 147
Bukharan plums 280, 440
Bukharan trade with Muscovite Noghays
restricted 111, 268, 282, 483
Bukharan visitors to Muscovy
access to Moscow forbidden 489-90
exempted from dues 492
not allowed to immigrate 491, 492
trade practices 494n
Bukharan visitors to Siberia
concessions 516, 521, 524
exempted from tax 504, 505
fair treatment required 503, 504,
S05;,529s535
restrictions 506, 508, 513, 515,
520, 522, 524, 526, 527, 528,
534, 542
smuggle forbidden goods 518, 519,
521?, 536
suspected of spying 504

assassinated

11, l1n

besieges ‘Abdallah at Qarakul 10
gives Bukhara to ‘Abdallah 10
joint ruler of Bukhara 9
murders Yar Muhammad 10
burmistry 533
Burundigq Sultan, Khwarazmian 147
Buryat 429
busa 491 and pass.
captain's duties 393
description and use 393
extortions by crew 60, 393
no trade in Bukhara for captain 499
Bushuktu Khan - see Galdan
Buzah Khwar, Kichkunchid 416
attacks Samarqand 32
flees Tawakkul in 1582 41
flees to Noghays with Baba S. 40
joins Baba Sultan in 1579 33
put to death 41
threatens Andijan, Miyankal 36, 38
byaz' 365-6, 365n, 366n, 434, 436,
458, 484
camel load 436
camels 280, 432, 440-1, 453, 448, 455
caravanserais

in India 443-4, 443n, 444n, 445
in Iran 439
in the khanate 413, 419, 434
in Turkey 435
Carmarthen, marquess of 529-30, 532
carpets 389, 442, 444, 450, 457, 459
castoreum 385-6, 433, 500, 526
Chaghatai language 3
chahar bagh 237, 237n
Chahar Jiy
qadi nurses ‘Abdallah to health 43
taken by Nadir Muhammad 129
taken back by Wali Muhammad 131
chahar si 6
chaldar 367-8
Chand Bibi of Ahmadnagar 89
Chardin, French traveller 440, 441
on Balkh envoy to Iran 305, 414
on Uzbeg hatred of Iran 14

warned against khanate 414
- and pass.
Cherkasskii P.M., Tobol'sk voevoda
527, 528, 531
chet’, chetvert', chetei , measure of
weight 466-7, 537, 537n

628

Index

Chichkanov Taushko, Tatar guide
given message for tsar 494-5
robbed by Qazaqs 354, 355
Chinese? embassy to Bukhara 348
chit 450, 451
- see also vyboika
Chobak Balykov, Bukharan envoy
forbidden access to Moscow 165
reaches Tyumen’ in 1622 509
sent back without gifts 203
Chokur, Sungar chief 430n
Chubin 233
chabtar 366, 367
Chuchak Bi, Balkh amir
takes letter to Murad Bakhsh 236
Chichak Khanum of Kashghariya 48
cinnamon 380-1, 451, 459, 514
Circassian, Circassians 526, 529
coss, measure of length 248n
Cossacks
attack Bukharans in Siberia 505
attack travellers to Muscovy 59,
142, 319
capital seized by Ottomans 324n
fight Qalmaq 319
raid Turkmen 156
rob Daudov's party 319-20
trade in Siberia 538
trade with Bukhara 500
- see also Ermak, Stenka Razin,
Zarutskii
cost of living in khanate 251-2, 282
cottons carried 363-70, 457-8
Crimea, Crimean 19, 80, 282, 340,
484, 489, 494
Dabusi
attacked by Anusha 335
rebels seek refuge 351
seized by Baqi Muhammad 106
walls repaired in 1568 22
Daichin, Derbet, son of Dalai
location of encampments 411
refuses to fight khanate 220
trade missions to Bukhara 215
widow sends Bukharans to Tyumen’
430, 450
Daichin, Torgout, son of Ho Urluk
attacks Noghays in 1533 182
followers rob Khwajah Ibrahim 195
joint trade mission to China with
Bukhara? 205, 205n
refuses to fight khanate 220
suggests raid on Bukhara 205
swears vassalage to tsar 483n
war with Ablai 291
Dalai (Dalai Daichin), Derbet kuntaidzhi
death 203

fights Torgouts in 1635 188n
receives Qazaq embassies 168
receives Muscovite envoy 431
son refuses to fight Bukhara 190

stops sale of slaves to Bukhara 183
Dalai, Kuchumite Prince 510
Dalai Ubashi, Derbet chief
trades through Bukharans 430
Dalantai Qalmaq 243
Danilo, trader from Vologda 465
Daniyal, Mughal Prince 104
dara‘t - see dorogi
Dara Shikuh, Mughal Prince
death 277, 277n, 278
defeated by Aurangzib 275
embassies to Nadir M. 196, 20910, 210n
embassy to ‘Abd al-‘Aziz 265
marches towards Barbar 195-6
sent to Qandahar in 1642 209
siege of Qandahar 268, 269n
Darwish Sultan, son of Nauruz Ahmad
confirmed as ruler of Tashkent 29
killed 31
pays homage to Iskandar 17
supports Baba Sultan in 1575 26
Daudov Vasilii, Muscovite envoy
accusations against him 312-5, 31922
aims of mission to Bukhara 309-10
asks for Torgout escort 315, 316
audience in Bukhara 316
captives brought back 317, 318,
319, 427
complains about
Astrakhan voevody 315
Epenet 313-4
pominki 311
strel'tsy 315
departs from
Astrakhan 315
Khiva 319
Moscow 312
origin and early history 308

report 316, 319
requests to Tsar 311, 313-4
robbed at Yaitsk 319
salary 519n
Simbirsk incident 313-5
size of suite 308
subsequent missions 322
Daulat Bi Kinkas, Bukharan amir
defects to ‘Abd al-‘Aziz 230
submits to Nadir Muhammad 207
Dawar Bakhsh, Mughal Emperor 172,
181n

Index
Dement'ev Levka, servant of Daudov
319, 319n
Derbet Qalmaq 142n, 183, 430
De Rodes 384, 481, 482-3, 483n
desyataya den'ga, desyatye den'gi, M.
tax 513, 535
desyataya poshlina, M. tax 507, 514,
523, 538, 539, 540
desyatina 531, 532, 535, 537n
Devlet Girei, Kuchumite 142n
Devochkin, Muscovite envoy
sold into slavery 427
Din Muhammad Ashtarkhanid
attacks Herat in 1598 97
banned from Sistan 83-4
battle of Pul-i Salar 101
besieges Qandahar in 1594 77
chases Shahrukh to India 47-8
coins in grandfather's name 100
conquers
Sistan in 1596 87
Tun & Quhistan in 1591 68, 69
Zamindawar in 1593-4 77
death 101, 101n
defeats
and kills Sulaiman Khalifa 76
Mirza Sulaiman in 1584 49
Rustam Mirza in Sistan 76
diwanbegi acts as Shah's envoy 114
fights in Sistan in 1598 78
forces Sistanis to pay taxes 77, 77n
invited into Herat 100
marries a Shi‘a 69
Offers allegiance to ‘Abbas 97
rebels against ‘Abd al-Mu’min 97
recalled from Qandahar 77
reconquers Tun in 1593 76
son keen to avenge him 144, 170
stops massacre at Mashhad 64
takes over Khurasan 100
Din Muhammad of Balkh, Janibegid
abandons Khurasan campaign 19
captured at Zamin in 1578 29
fails to help ‘Abdallah 23, 24
formally appointed to Balkh 20
helps ‘Abdallah in 1567 21
loses Balkh in 1573 25
loss of Tirmidh in 1572 24
marches on Balkh in 1561 16
submits to ‘Abdallah 24
Din Muhammad of Marw
claimed as friend by Safavids 71
daughter marries ‘Abdallah 14
hostile towards Iran and khanate 14
dorogi 371, 462, 477, 501, 502
doshchaniki 399, 465
drovyanaya, tax 536n

Dust Bik, Balkh envoy 260
Dustum, “Abd al-Mu’min's envoy 60
Dustum, brother of ‘Abdallah II
appointed to Kasbi 12, 12n
appointed to Tashkent in 1582 42
besieges Shahrukhiya 41
death in 1598 96
defeated by Tawakkul in 1585 49
demoted to Karmina 49
flees before Suyunchids 44
helps ‘Abdallah against rebels 78
leads Kashghariyan campaign 81
makes no claim to the throne 46
pursues Mu’min Sultan in 1583 44
supports Hazara Sultan 96
Dustum, brother of Baba Sultan 29
Dustum Bi Qushchi 43
dvadsataya poshlina 509, 523
dvorovaya, tax 465, 465n
dyes 387-8
- see also indigo, madder
efimok, efimki
definition 485
exchange rate 291n, 485, 485n
Efremov Filip 400
Elden, Torgout
goes to trade in Bukhara 429
suggests attack on Siberia, rather
than Bukhara 205
Eletskii, Tara voevoda
instructions of 1595 86-7, 503-4
instructions of 1596 90-1, 504-5
returns goods to Bukharans 506
Elizabeth, queen of England
irritated by Muscovite etiquette 61
told about ‘Abdallah 1
English
concessions by IvanIV 13
‘money inn’ 460, 483
privileges curtailed 477, 477n, 478
-Epenet, Muscovite gerfalconer
accused by Daudov 313
accuses Daudov 313, 320-1
reports on Daudov's mission 315,
315n, 317, 317n
Ermak, Cossack
conquers Siberia 50
death 50, 503
ermine 377, 456
export dues in Muscovy and Siberia
523, 530, 538, 539, 539n, 540
Fabricius, Swedish envoy 333
Fadil Khwajah, Bukharan
appointed to Andijan in 1631 178
killed in 1633 187
Fadil Yuz, governor of Samargand
flees before khan's army 352

630

Index
Fadil Yuz (continued)
rebels against Subhan Quli 350, 359

restrictions in Siberia - see Bukharan
visitors

falcons 43

trade by Siberian officials 526
trade permitted only after yasak
collection 515
fiuta 372, 452
Gadai Sultan, Kichkunchid 11, 21
Gagarin Sila, Tara voevoda 506

- see also hunting-birds

False Dmitri 140, 141
Fara 59, 66, 66n
Farhad Khan, Iranian amir
abortive siege of Nishapur 69
advises against siege of Mashhad 84
appointed to Damghan in 1595 83
conquers Gilan in 1592 69
fights Din M. at Pial-i Salar 101
takes Mashhad in 1598 100
Faujqar Bik, Balkh envoy 259
Fedor I, ruler of Muscovy 464
ambivalent towards Bukharans 86,
504-5
detains Bukharan envoys 87
embassies to khanate 51
forbids taxing of official goods 60
insists on correct title 60-1
mistrusts Bukharan envoys 61
restricts access to Moscow 469
Shah boasts of his friendship 93
suspicious of Bukharans 90, 505
tells Tawakkul to fight ‘Abdallah 87
threatens Kuchum suppliers 91
Fedor II, ruler of Muscovy
accession 317
allows rhubarb imports 491, 518
decrees no-man's-land around trade
inn 491
gift to Balkh envoy 323
stops immigration 413-4
suspicious of Turks and Bukharans
491-2
takes no action about Mangishlaq
325
Fedorov Onufrei, Siberian envoy
goes to Bukhara 291
Fedot'ev, Muscovite envoy 437
Feofilov Fedor, Yamysh voevoda 532,
532n, 533
Filaret Patriarch 157, 183
fruit of khanate 380, 448, 449-50,
450n, 457
Fryer, English traveller 439, 330
Fulad Sarai, relative of Yalangtush
released to the khanate in 1653 268
under arrest in Iran 266
furs
carried by Bukharans 375-9, 431,
432, 433, 436, 441, 449, 450,
454, 456, 514, 536
concessions to Bukharans 504,
516, 521, 524

Galdan, Sungar kuntaidzhi (Bushuktu)

Ayuka interferes with camping 340
defeats Bukharans ? 274, 274n
destroys Qazaq towns 337, 412
difficulties with nephew 354
distributes zenden' as gifts 431
envoys escort Seitkul Ablin 288
kills Jahangir Sultan Qazaq 270n
marches to river Talas 411
sends Bukharan agents to Siberia
and China 430, 434, 453, 519
takes Kashgahriyan ruler to Altai
341
Gantimur 288
Garmsir
Bukharans expelled 84
conquered by Din Muhammad 77
seized by Iran 121
Gengis Khan 2, 83
Geraili - see ‘Ali Khan
Gerbillon 405, 406, 409
gerfalcons
die on way to Bukhara 315, 316
diet and cost 147-8
hunting ability 60
listed as zapovednye

423, 469,

470, 504, 508-9
numbers sent in 1675 320-1, 321n
preferred by ‘Abd al-‘Aziz 295
refused to Bukharan envoys 165,
202
requested by
“Abd al-‘Aziz 307
“Abdallah 502
Imam Quli 140, 147
Subhan Quli 323
seized by ‘Abbas I in 1647 242
seized by Anusha in 1675 316,320
seized by Nadir Muhammad 158
sent to India 169, 192
sent to
‘Abd al-‘Aziz 311
Imam Quli 148
Nadir Muhammad 167, 225-6
Shah by ‘Abd al-*Aziz 328
Subhan Quli 323
Yushan 216

631

Index

leaves Isfahan for Moscow 256
on foreign embassies to Iran 254-6
on Mughal campaign to Balkh 246,
251-2, 253
on travel routes 391, 402, 403
refuses to see khan in Marw 243
second mission 242-56 pass.
gruzovaya, M. tax 464, 482
gulyashchie 539
gushti, Indian tax 446
Gutfel Ch., tobacco monopolist 534n
Habash, Khwarazmian Prince
attacks Bukhara in 1621 157
bullies Khokhlov 156-7
death 164, 164n
demands gifts from Khokhlov 150
envoy detained in Muscovy 165

Gha’ib Nazar Bi, Bukharan amir
campaign to Bala Murghab 344,
344n

fights rebels 351
rebels? 350n
Gharjistan
definition 124
given to Uzbeg pretenders 124
shortages of food 136
Ghazi Bik, Mughal envoy
escorts Nadir M.'s son to Balkh
261
Godunov P.I., Tobol'sk voevoda 287-8
gold and silver
allegedly exported by traders 489
acquisition forbidden by tsar 486
carried by traders 386, 451, 452
cloth of 372-3, 458
crisis in Muscovy 484
export from Iran forbidden 373
inported into Siberia 523
imports taxed in India 379
needed for trade dues 485-7, 496,
517, 542
price 387, 459
purchased in khanate 501
sent to khanate 500
taken back by Mulla Farrukh 488
tsar forbids sale 473
- see zapovednye for export
prohibitions by tsars
Golitsyn Ivan, Astrakhan voevoda 478
Golitsyn Prince 493
Golovin Petr, Astrakhan voevoda 473
golovshchina, M. tax 464, 464n
Gornov Ivan, interpreter in Daudov's
party 315n
Gorokhov Savin, Muscovite envoy 215
gost’, gosti 496, 500, 538
duties 463, 499n
privileges 498-9,
gostinyi dvor 460, 461, 465, 480, 488,
491, 506, 509, 515, 517, 517n,
S215 S20 RO3l
cost of accomodation 461
trade outside it forbidden 475
- see also Astrakhan gostinyi dvor
gostinnaya sotnya 498, 499, 525
Gribov Anisim, Muscovite envoy
audiences in Bukhara 215, 219
consulted about madder 479
first mission 204-5, 215-22
gifts seized 241-2
information gathered 246, 247n,
253, 256n
journey to Bukhara 215
leaves Bukhara for Moscow 221

fights Ilbars 157, 160
sends Afghan M. to Moscow 157
topples “Arab Muhammad 156
Haidar Mirza, Iranian Prince
death 66, 66n
renounces Shi‘ism 79
sent to Istanbul as hostage 66
Hafiz Khutai, Bukharan envoy
sent to Turkey 68, 68n
Hajji Ata Quli, Bukharan envoy
detained in Yaroslavl’ 183
goods carried 419
mission to Muscovy 182-3
tax assessment in Astrakhan 476

Hajji Awez (Awaz), Khwarazmian trader
464, 467, 468, 469
Hajji Bi, Bukharan governor of Herat
opens doors to Din Muhammad 100
resists Din Muhammad 97
Hajji Bi Qushchi, Bukharan amir
appointed ataliq to Nadir M. 126
executed by Wali M. 129
sent to defend Balkh 126
Hajji Farrukh, Bukharan envoy
accused by Daudov 321
aims of his embassy 307
arrives in Moscow 307
background 306
complains about
Tobol'sk voevody 308
Daudov 313-4
gifts for tsar 306
gifts received from tsar 312
goods carried 306
interview with Matveev 307-8
leaves Astrakhan 315
leaves Moscow 312
Qalmag gift to Nadir M. 215, 215n
route to Tobol'sk 399

sent to Muscovy 265-6

632

Index

Hajji Farrukh (continued)
suggestions about travel to Bukhara
307-8
tries to foster trade 307-8, 423, 501
wife 312n, 314, 314n
Hajji [ltamish, Bukharan envoy
embassy to India 24
Hajjim Khan, ruler of Khwarazm

takes Yalangttsh's baggage and
horses 146
Hasan Khwajah Jiibari
related to Imam Quli 257n
sends Aman Gildei to Moscow 157
sent back from India 175
Hasan qushbegi, Bukharan envoy
first embassy to Iran 254-5
second embassy 290
Hashim Sultan, governor of Hisar
capture and execution 25
parentage 24n, 25n
supports Din M. of Balkh 24
hasil, Indian tax 445, 446

flees Khwarazm in 1595 86
flight to Iran in 1593 75
helps “Abdallah
against Balkh in 1573 24

against Herat in 1587 53
helps with siege of Nishapur 69
hostile to Nir Muhammad 69
pledges support to Shah 65
recovers Khwarazm 83, 86, 104,
104n
seeks refuge in Darun in 1593 74
son robs Salah Shah 70
summoned by Shah 108, 113
takes Marw from Nur M. 70
Hajji Sayyid Ahmad, Mughal envoy
sent to Istanbul 266n
Hakim Abu ’1-Fath, Akbar's favourite
gifts to Qul Baba 57
Hakim Hadhig, Mughal envoy
mission to the khanate 175-6
Hakim Humam, Mughal envoy
agrees frontier with khanate 57-8,
58n, 67
audience in Herat 57
delivers letter to ‘Abdallah 56
despatched with Mir Quraish 54
sent back to India 62
son despatched to khanate 175
writes to ‘Abdallah on behalf of
Akbar 78
Hamza Bik, Qandahar official
killed 66
resented by Muzaffar Husain 66
Hamza, Iranian Prince
given powers of ruler 55
widow marries ‘Abbas I 59
Haqq Nazar Khan, Qazaq khan
agreement with Baba Sultan 33
death 36
sons help rebels in khanate 56
Haram Begum, wife of Mirza Sulaiman
slighted by daughter-in-law 48
Hasan Khan Shamlu, Iranian governor
defends Herat at father's death 146
dismissive of Bukharans 178
fights‘Abd al-‘Aziz? 178-9
plots attack on khanate 200, 200n
raids Jijektu in 1632 180

Hazara Sultan, son of Uzbeg Sultan
rebels against “Abd al-Mu’min 96,
96n
chases rebels from Tashkent 56
death 96
Hazarjat/Hazaras, Afghan tribe
appeal for help
against khanate pretenders 125
against Yalangtush 166
harass retreating Mughals 253
help Imam Quli against Qazaqs 131

help Yalangtish against Ubeh 158
rebel against Mughals

194

Herat

besieged by ‘Abdallah 56-8
besieged by ‘Ubaidallah 34
falls to ‘Abdallah 58
opens doors to Din Muhammad 100
retaken by ‘Abbas I 191
hides 373-5, 431, 432-3, 443, 448,
450, 452, 456, 500, 501
Hisar
attacked by the Qirghiz 56
ceded to Qasim Muhammad 270
falls to ‘Abdallah 25
governed by Bahram Sultan 230
Nadir M. fails to regain it 272
rebellion of ‘Ubaidallah Sultan 123
taken by ‘Abd al-‘Aziz 231
horses
carried by Bukharans 441, 448,
449, 453, 455, 455n, 502, 521,
452
export from Iran forbidden 440
hides 375
purchased by Bukharans 427, 431,
432
sent as gifts 114, 167, 171, 176,
185, 186, 194, 196, 198, 199,
PNY OS fyP32), AOS PASS OMAN
278, 279, 280, 289, 299, 300,
306, 306, 319, 328, 348
tax 448, 467, 523

633

Index
horses (continued)

appoints to Tashkent
his own son 178

value in China 455
Ho Urluk, Torgout
attacks Noghays 182
moves to Qara Qum 178
sons attack khanate 182
suggests attack on khanate 205
hunting-birds 43, 192, 449, 451, 508,
509, 509n
Humayun Mirza, Badakhshan impostor
defeated by ‘Abd al-Amin 109
killed by Badi‘ w’l-Zaman 115
takes over Badakhshan 105
Husain Baiqara, Timurid ruler
manuscript about him 57
mentioned by ‘Abd al-Mu’min 70
Husain Khan Shamli, Iranian governor
death 146
Husam Khan, Jamshidi chief
attacks Maruchaq 271, 273
‘Tbadallah, brother of ‘Abdallah II
appointed to Samargand 30
fights in Khurasan in 1567 19
helps ‘Abdallah
against Baba Sultan 39-42
against rebel Princes 28
last respects to father 46
marches against Tawakkul 49
murdered in 1585 50
reports on Samarqand attack 34
sent to deal with Abt ’1-Khair 30
takes Shahr-i sabz in 1552 9

Ishim Sultan's son 136
Tursun Sultan's son

asked to help Tikhanov 141
asks uncle for better appanage 125
at peace with Khwarazm 142, 144
attacks on Khurasan during his reign
142-3, 144, 145, 146, 158-9,
179-80, 182, 184-5, 191, 194
audience to Hakim Hadhiq 176
audiences to Khokhlov 152, 155
avenges son 189
blesses ‘Abbas II 211
coinage policy 182, 206, 420

confirms Ishim Sultan in Tashkent
172
conflict with Wali M. 127-8, 128
deals with Mughal agent provocateur
200
death 211, 234n
demands free travel and trade for
envoy 182-3, 476
embassies and trade missions to
Muscovy 139-42, 147-8, 1557, 165, 182-3, 187, 419,
embassies from India 143, 163,
175-6, 201, 201n
embassies to India 163-4, 170, 199200, 201
embassy to China? 147
embassy to Iran 146-7
embassy to the Noghays 142
embassy to the Sungar Batur 203
execution of Wali M. 133, 133n
fights
pretenders 126
Qalmaq 182, 184
Qazags 131-2, 146, 154?, 166,
189
financial expedients 135, 419-20
firm stand against Mughals 170
flights
to Qarshi in 1611 132
to Balkh 127, 154
gives away Mughal gifts 176
helps Abili against enemies 146
helps Kashghariyan Prince 189
ignores Mughal envoys 175-6
indirect approaches to India 143,
151-2
invites Qazagqs to attack uncle 127
Jawanan threaten ‘Abd al-Rahman
228

“Ibadallah, son of Subhan Quli

murdered by brother 329-30, 330n
Ibrahim, Ottoman ruler
at peace with Iran 203
Nadir M. writes to him 257
Ibrahim, Kashghariyan Prince 281
Ibrahim Bik, Balkh envoy
alleged causes of death 279
death deplored by Aurangzib 284
embassy to India 278
Ibrahim yasawil, Balkh envoy
takes hunting-birds to India 201

Ibrahim Khwajah, Balkh envoy
sent to Iran 161n
Ides Ysbrand, Muscovite envoy
sent to China 522
Ilbars, Khwarazmian Prince
attacks Bukhara in 1621 157
bullies Khokhlov 156
death 164, 164n
fights Habash 157, 160
Imam Quli Bahadur, Iranian envoy 72
Imam Quli, ruler of khanate

abdication 203, 205-8
appointed to Samarqand

131

arrives in Qazwin 210-1, 211n

leads Badakhshan campaign

124, 125

leaves for Mecca 208, 208n

634

124

Index
Imam Quli (continued)
letters to and from Istanbul

V3), 21/5 Sy SBM, BES, SI),
539n, 540, 541, 542

144,
170
loses his sight 205
marches to
Shahrukhiya in 1623 166
Tashkent in 1628 174
Turkestan in 1630 178

Indians in khanate 5, 380, 414, 451-2

Indians in Muscovy 460, 462, 488,
489, 491, 491n, 492, 493
indigo
availability in India 451
preparation and misuses 387-8
inns, see caravansarais, gostinyi dvor
Isaev Ivan, Muscovite trader
given rhubarb monopoly 524
Isen Gildei, Balkh envoy
detained in Muscovy 27
Isfandiyar, cousin of “Abdallah
chases rebels from Tashkent 56
gives chase to Mu’min Sultan 44
given Farghana 42
helps ‘Abdallah fight Baba Sultan
39-42
loses track of Baba Sultan 40
Isfandiyar, ruler of Khwarazm
Abi ’1-Ghazi tries to topple him 172
anxious to fight the Qalmaq 204
asks for Shah's support 160
blockaded by Abu ’1-Ghazi 202
death 214, 214n
demands more Russian boats 204
envoys to Muscovy 204, 222, 223
falls out with Abu *1-Ghazi 167
seizes power in 1623 164
sends for Abu *1-Ghazi 160, 164
stops Bukharan ambassadors 204
succession plans 217
Isfara’in
besieged by “Abd al-Mu’min 83-4
reverts to Iran 71
taken by ‘Abd al-Mu’min 69
Ishaq Bik, Mughal envoy
missions to Nadir M. 235, 237
urges Murad Bakhsh to march 236

marries Ay Khanum 130
marries Ishim Sultan's daughter 150
money problems 147, 155
offers Muscovite slaves to tsar 147
on good terms
with Iran 146-7, 163
with Khwarazm 142, 147, 164
promises further slaves to tsar 155-6
puts ataliq to death 127
recalls troops from frontier 198
receives Tursun Sultan's submission
144
refuses
help to Iran against Turkey 122
help to Mughal pretender 200
to support Khusrau against father
186
regains Tashkent and Sabran from
Qalmaq 182
returns prisoners to Iran 177, 180
sends armies against
Qalmaq 153, 185
Qazaqs 154, 168-9, 174
sends back Abu ’I-Ghazi 160, 164
sent to fight ‘Ubaidallah Sultan 123

success against Abili and Ishim 136
suggests joint attack on Iran
to Ottomans 144
to Mughals 170
suggests cure for rebel Prince 170
summons brother to Samarqand 207
supports Isfandiyar 172
taken to Maimana as a child 102
trade agents to Muscovy 139, 419
unpopular 421
visits to Balkh 166, 195
welcomed in Iran 210-1
welcomes Abu ’1-Ghazi 156
Imam Rida's shrine in Mashhad
gifts from Pir Muhammad 15
pillaged 64
spire returned to Iran 113
visited by Imam Quli 210
visited by Shah ‘Abbas 114
visited by Wali Muhammad 129
- see also ‘Ali Rida
import dues in Muscovy and Siberia
485, 507, 508, 509, 510, 514, 517,

Ishim Sultan, brother of Tawakkul
attacks
Abiuli in 1625 169
Imam Quli's camp in 1620 151
the khanate 102, 124, 131
Turstn M.'s camp in 1613 139
daughter marries Imam Quli 150
death in 1628 174
defeated by Yalangtish in 1612 136
defeated in 1606 near Tashkent 125
embassy to Dalai 168
falls out with Tursin Sultan 171
fights Qalmaq 171
helps Imam Quli against uncle 133
introduces Abt ’1-Ghazi to Tursun
Sultan 168
kills Tursin in 1627 172

635

Index

Ishim Sultan (continued)
makes peace with Tursun 168
offers friendship to Imam Quli 136

appointed to Balkh? 339n
kills Abu *l-Manstr 330
Jagat Singh, Rajah
builds fort at Chubin 233
Jahangir, Mughal Emperor
accepts loss of Qandahar 162
accession 123
allegedly insults Imam Quli 176n
death 171
embassies and letters from khanate
132, 143, 163-4, 170-1
embassies to khanate 143, 163,
164, 170, 170n
encourages trade 445-6
kidnapped 171

rules Qalmaq 53
son named to Tashkent 186
submits to Imam Quli 172
threatens Tashkent in 1611 136
Ishterek, chief of the Big Noghays
embassy from Bukhara in 1608 134
forbidden links with Bukhara 111
moves across Volga 142, 410
opposes sales of Muscovites to
Bukhara 362
Iskandar Bi Sarai, Bukharan amir
fails to defend Bukhara 326
Iskandar, ruler of khanate
accepted as ruler 17
appoints governors in 1582 42
death 45, 45n
flees Miyankal in 1551 9
full accession 19
limited accession 16, 16n
simple-minded 19, 19n
younger brother? 17, 17n, 19, 19n
Iskandar, son of Imam Quli
appointed to Tashkent 178
killed 188, 188n
unpopular 187
Iskandar, son of Subhan Quli
appointed to Balkh 328
killed 329, 329n
Isma‘il, Noghay chief 427-8
Isma‘il I, ruler of Iran
kills Muhammad Shaibani 3
revenge on Muhammad Shaibani 14
takes Khurasan & Khwarazm 14
tricks Muhammad Shaibani into
battle 101
Isma‘il II, ruler of Iran
accession 27
assassination 43n
Ivan IV (the Terrible), ruler of Muscovy
annexes Kazan' and Astrakhan 12
concessions to foreigners 13, 13n
decides to conquer Siberia 503
envoys to khanate 13, 25, 30, 503
gifts to ‘Abdallah in 1583 43
orders building of Ural forts 502
Ivan and Peter, tsars of Muscovy

loses Qandahar 160

plans attack on khanate 123
sends money to Juibari shaykhs 151
welcomes ‘Abd al-Rahim Khwajah
g/l

- see also Salim, Mughal Prince

Jahangir, son of Ishim Qazaq
attacks Bukhara 246
captured by Batur 219, 219n
daughter marries ‘Abd al-‘Aziz 214
death 270n
defeats Batur 220
envoy to Batur 203, 203n
fights Torgouts 188n
helps ‘Abd al-‘Aziz against Mughals
246, 253
helps Murad Sultan against Tashkent
188
son visits Bukhara 255, 255n
threatens Nadir M. in 1643 219
Jahangir Sultan, Abulkhairid
appointed to Balkh by the Shah 116
death 126, 126n
fights in Balkh province 126
flees to Iran in 1600 112
goes to Gharjistan in 1606 124
named to Tashkent by Pir M. 103
promised help by Shah 113
Jalala, Tariki chief
attacks Mughals 62, 88
returns to India empty-handed 68
seeks refuge in the khanate 62
Jalal al-Din, Badakhshani Prince
flees to Iran 205n
Jalal al-Din, Sistani Prince
mission to Iran 88
Jalim Sultan, Qazaq Prince 33, 36,
137n
Janabad, see Delhi
Jan Bik, Mughal amir
stopped on way to Qandahar 267

complaint from Arang 344
request freeing of Muscovites 354
Ivanov Ofanasii, Muscovite priest
saves Daudoy 319
taken back by Daudov 318
jade 435, 452, 453, 456
Jadum Bi Ming, khanate official
advises march on Bakh 342, 342n

636

Index

Janibegids
“Abdallah II is the greatest 8
definition 6, 6n
flee before khaqan's troops 9, 10

between ‘Abdallah and son 93
with Iran? 163
with the Qazaqs 103, 151?
powerful 4-5, 13-4, 111, 121
purchases of properties 413, 416,
417
receive money from India 151
relations with India 259, 267
stop khan pursuing Khwarazmians
532
support ‘Abdallah 9, 45, 46
taxed by Nadir Muhammad 226
trade with India 443
wide-ranging interests 4-5
withdraw support from Imam Quli
134
write to Aurangzib 283
Kabakly Khan, Khwarazmian ruler
accession 355
kabal'nyi kholop 495
Kabul
Balkh envoy detained 194
Nadir M.'s campaign 173, 174
Khana Zad razes fort of Chubin 166

Jani Muhammad, ruler of khanate
accession as sultan suri 113

coinage in his name 419
considered as ruler in 1598 99, 99n
death 119, 120
entrusted with Din M. of Balkh 29
half-brother named to Tashkent 95
Jan Muhammad Bik, Bukharan amir
detained in khanate 115
mission to Baqi Muhammad 114-5
Jan Nathar Khan, Mughal envoy
helped on return journey 256
humiliated by ‘Abbas II 254, 258
sent back to India 255
sent to Iran 241
warns of Shah's plans 257
jawanan of Imam Quli 228, 228n

Jawanmard “Ali, Kuchkunchid 416
arrested in 1578 28
fights ‘Abdallah in Miyankal 22
joint ruler of Samarqand 11
rebels against ‘Abdallah 28
seizes Shahr-i sabz 21
sides with Baba Sultan in 1575 25
Jenkinson Anthony, English trader 395
description of Bukhara 5-6
mission to Bukhara 13-4
on Khwajah Islam's power 13-4
on route to China 408
on khanate trade 413-4, 442, 451
Jews in khanate 5, 5n, 435
Jijektu
‘Abdallah retires there 10
asks help against pretender 125
razed to the ground by Shah 117
Johnson Richard, English trader
on travel 392, 395, 396, 406-7
Jachi, Khwarazmian ruler
accession. 353n
Jachi, son of Genghis Khan
claimed as ancestor 2
Juibari shaikhs
accompany Bukharan envoys to
India 157, 186
ancestors 62, 170
build caravanserais 413
defect to Mughals 239
envoys to Muscovy 157, 461-2
gifts and help from khans 5, 9, 14,
25, 25n, 46, 47, 62, 120
help traitors? 196
intercede with rebels in 1694 351
mediate

Qasim Khan assassinated

105

Zafar Khan replaced 167
Kafsh Qalmaq, Balkh amir
accepts surrender of Balkh 252
advises Nadir M. in Marw 238
brother's embassy to India 261-2
fails to take Chubin 233
negotiates with Aurangzib 252
put to death 259
sent to take Maimana
from the Mughals 238
from ‘Abd al-‘Aziz 258
wounded by Baqi Yuz 227
Kahmard
appointment of Subhan Quli 213
captured by Mughals, 231, 234
retaken by Tardi ‘Ali 231
Kai, Iranian courier
on alleged Iranian victory 73n
Kamal al-Din, Iranian envoy
sent to Balkh in 1624 167
kamka, kamkha
description and uses 371-2
K'ang Tsi, Chinese Emperor

453, 456

distributes khanate dried fruit 457
gifts to Ablin in 1654 269
welcomes Ablin in 1669 289
karbas, see byaz'
Karmanoy Baikram, Muscovite envoy
sent to Bukhara 51
Karmina
attacked by Burhan Sultan 1
battle involving Abi ’1-Ghazi 272

637

Index

power in 1550 4
khanate officials 2, 4
khanate envoys in Europeans eyes
dirty 279, 305-6
greedy 280
refined 146
khanlyq 152, 155, 187
- see also tanga
Khan Shikhal, governor of Mashhad
alleged successes 286, 287
Kharakula, Sungar Qalmaq 165
Khitai (Qipchaq)
ally with Anusha against khanate
3334
lose towns to Tauka 254
rebel against “Abd al-‘Aziz 326
support rebels against Subhan Quli
2 3515332
Khmelnitskii, Cossack ataman 282
Khokhlov Ivan, Muscovite envoy
audiences in Bukhara 152, 155, 209
brings back Afghan M. 157
difficulties in
Bukhara 152-3, 133
Khwarazm 150, 156, 501
early history 148
gifts from Imam Quli 155
instructions 148-9
journey to Bukhara 149
leaves khanate 155
mission to khanate 148-58
on Bukhara-Khanqa journey 391
report 154, 157-8, 421
slaves taken back 155-6
Khoshout Qalmaq 142n, 269, 411
- see also Ablai, Chagan
kKhozhenoe, M. tax 465
Khozziyan, Bukharan envoy
mission to Tobol'sk 202-3
Khudabanda, Kashghariyan Prince
alleged rebellion in 1587-8 63n
death in 1595 82
rebellion of 1591 81, 81n, 82
father and brothers exiled 62
Khudai Birdi, Kachkunchid
fights to retain Qarshi 11-2
given Sakharj 12
raids Miyankal 22
put to death 22
Khudaida, ruler of Khwarazm
accession 339, 340n
death 343, 343n, 344n
Khudai Nazar Bi, Bukharan amir
flees to Iran 107
named ataliq to M. Ibrahim 108
put to death 111

Karmina (continued)

holds out against Anusha 334
Kashghariya
geographical definition 48
hostile towards khanate 12n
refuge for khanate rebels 12, 52,
174, 187
trade links with Bukhara 435-6
Kashghariyan embassies to khanate
In 1584 48
In 1589 62
In 1661 281
In 1685 340
In 1692 348
Kasimov, Muscovite envoy
accompanied by Balkh envoy 322
deceives tsar? 319-20
departs from Moscow 312
frees Muscovites from Bukhara 427
instructions re behaviour 310
leaves Khiva on return journey 319
results of mission 317-8
sent to India 308, 308n
Kazan’
access requested by Bukharans 18
annexed by tsar 12, 460
Kazi Kaziev, Bukharan envoy
detained in Tara 183, 510
visits the Derbet Kuisha 411, 429
Kelesh, Turkmen chief 315
Khalaf Bik, Iranian amir
retakes Sarakhs from Uzbegs 181,
182
seizes Yalangtush's nephew 181
sent against Yalangtush stronghold
in 1622 162
sent to raise siege of Marw 180
Khalifa Sultan, Iranian vizier
against helping Nadir M. 138
prevents despatch of ‘Ali Mardan's
son 254
sends back Gribov 256
writes to Shah Jahan 241
Khalil Allah, Mughal amir
left in joint charge of Balkh 239
Khalil Bik, Mughal amir
sent to Bamian and khanate 234
takes Kahmard 231
Khan Ahmad of Gilan
defies ‘Abbas I 69
flees to Istanbul 69
offers Gilan to Sultan 74
Khana Zad Khan, governor of Kabul
razes fort of Chubin 166
removed from post 267
khaqan
consecration 3, 46

638

Index
Khurasan
conquered by Shah Isma‘il 3, 14
conquered by Shaibani 3
definition 1n
embassies to ‘Abdallah 44, 48, 51-2
taken by ‘Abbas I 101
- see also Herat, Mashhad
Khurram, see Shah Jahan
Khishi Bi, Bukharan envoy
embassy to India 289 .
Khushika Bi Kara’it, Bukharan amir
mission to India 262
Khushika Bi Yuz, Bukharan amir
fights Anusha 332, 333, 334-6
leads Bala Murghab expedition? 344
leads campaign to Marw 347, 347n
rejects Anusha's advances 335-6
sent against Tauka in 1688 342
Khushi Lab Chak, Bukharan amir 259
Khishkhal Bi, khanate official
rebels against Subhan Quli 350
submits 352
Khusrau, Mughal Prince
alleged son visits khanate 200, 200n
rebels against Jahangir 123
Khusrau, son of Nadir Muhammad

gifts delivered 280
gifts from Aurangzib 279, 280
mission to India 278-80
poor manners? 279-80
Khwajah Ahrar, Naqshbandi khwajah
278, 335, 356
Khwajah Apaq, Kashghariyan ruler
340, 348
Khwajah Ashraf, Mughal envoy
dismissed 91, 92, 92n
leaves Qarshi 93

sent to khanate 90
Khwajah Hashim of Deh Pidi, cleric
advises delay before punishing
Qazags 188
alleged negotiations with Qazaqs

154, 166n
defects to Imam Quli 129
miraculous help 133n.
negotiates Qazaq peace in 1623 166
writes to Jahangir in 1615 143
Khwajah Husain, Balkh trade agent
sent to Muscovy 421
Khwajah Ibrahim, Balkh envoy 494
allowance received in Moscow 461
arrives in Astrakhan 212, 222, 222n
detained in Khiva 204
dismissed from Moscow 222n
leaves Astrakhan for khanate 243
mission to
Iran in 1623 163
Muscovy 194-5, 202, 212-3
receives
shopping-list from khanate 222
news about khanate 206, 207
welcomed by Louzan 195
Khwajah Islam Juibari 462
disapproves of “Abdallah 12, 16
given Mudin 9
negotiates for Burhan Sultan 11
power according to Jenkinson 13-4
secures ‘Abdallah's appointment to
Bukhara 89
trades with Muscovy 10, 391, 392
Khwajah Jan, Balkh envoy

appointed to Khutlan 186
defeats rebels in 1638 192
defects to Mughals 235
helps uncle fight Qazags 188
named to Qunduz 213n
rebels against father 186
receives gifts on father's death 265
sent against Andijan 189
unwilling to leave India 260
Khusrau Sultan, cousin of ‘Abdallah II
appointed to Qarshi 12
confirmed in Shahr-i sabz 20
put to death 21
rebels against ‘Abdallah in 1567 19
sent against Nesef/Qarshi 1
Khwajah ‘Abd al-Ghaffar, cleric
friendship with Aurangzib 267
gifts for Shah Jahan 267
goes over to the Mughals 239
mediates between Subhan Quli and
brother 277
pir of ‘Abd al-‘Aziz 249
taken into Aurangzib's service 249
teaches Subhan Quli 278
writes to Aurangzib 283
Khwajah ‘Abd al-Khaliq, cleric
goes over to Mughals 245

mission to India in 1648 259, 259n
Khwajah Jan, Juibari agent
reception in Moscow 461, 462

Khwajah Khan, son of Uzbeg Khwajah
sent to Jahangir 132
Khwajah Mehr Amin, Bukharan envoy
goes to Iran 277
Khwajah M. Tahir, Balkh envoy
mission to India 323-4
Khwajah Musa Hajjim, khanate cleric
given village to reclaim 425

Khwajah Abu ’1-Ma‘ani, Mughal envoy

mission to Samarqand 342
Khwajah Ahmad, Bukharan envoy
death deplored by Emperor 284

639

Index

Khwajah Nasir, Mughal envoy
sent to khanate 152, 163
Khwajah Nasr Allah, Bukharan cleric
blesses Subhan Quli's son 329
Khwajah Nauriz, Bukharan envoy
detained 141
instructions 140
mission to Muscovy 139-41, 142,
182, 470
on Bukharo-Iranian relations 139

Kashghariya 81

Khwarazm 74, 86-7
sent against frontier tribes 44
Khwajam Yar Bi Ming, khanate official
rebels against Subhan Quli 349
Khwarazm
“Abdallah's victories 70, 73, 74, 86
accession of Juchi 353n

accession of Khudaida 339
annexed by Nadir M. 216-8
attacked by ‘Abdallah in 1576 27
attacked by Qalmaq 142, 158
Bukharan ruler appoints
Musi Sultan 360
Nadr Bi Barati 230

Khwajah Parsa

ancestor of Salih Khwajah 355
Khwajah Parsa, khanate cleric
defects to Mughals 239
Khwajah Qasim, Mughal envoy
mission to Balkh 262-3
Khwajah Quli Bahadur, Bukharan envoy
sent to Muscovy 68

Qasim M. 223

Shah Niyaz 358
hostility towards khanate 26
lost to khanate 104
ruler is Subhan Quli's vassal 355
trade with Bukhara 436-8
’. Khwarazmian amirs
embassies to Subhan Quli 340, 353
release Bukharan ambassador 353
Khwarazmian envoys to Muscovy 26,
60, 149, 165, 165n, 204, 223, 225,
244, 319, 325, 344, 358, 361
Khwarazmian Princes
defend Wazir in 1593 75
embassy to ‘Abdallah in 1584 48

Khwajah Quli Bi Utarchi of Samargand
interferes with khanate defence 332
invites Anusha to attack khanate 331
marches against khanate 334
offers bride to Anusha 335
Khwajah Sa‘d Juibari
appointed shaikh al-Islam 46
arranges “Abdallah's marriage 14
blesses Badakhshan campaign 47
blesses Khurasan campaign 52
buys caravanserai 413
canal repaired 49
death 67
disputations with ‘Abdallah 42
given hunting-birds 43
given land 25, 25n, 46, 47, 62
hunts with ‘Abdallah 47
kept informed by ‘Abdallah 36, 47
offered Badakhshan? 42n
pleas for clemency in 1582 41
possessions 5n
son supports Baqi Muhammad 111
Supports accession of Iskandar and
“Abdallah 20, 46
Khwajah Salih of Deh Pidi
sent money by Mughals 151
Khwajah Samandar, Bukharan cleric
negotiates with rebels 331
Khwajah Zaccharias of Samarqand
marries daughter to Anusha 335
negotiates Balkh peace 356, 356n
Khwajam Birdi, khanate official
dismissal requested 350
helps Subhan Quli 351
Khwajam Quli, Qalmaq Bukharan
chases Baba Sultan to Noghays 40
defeats Baba Sultan 41
embassy to ‘Ali Quli of Herat 52
leads campaigns to

expulsion from Iran requested 82
flee to Iran 75, 86
help Baba S. against Karmina 23
lose northern Khurasan 113
messages to ‘Abdallah in 1580 37
receive Bukharan envoy in Iran 147
tuler of Nesa visits khanate 27
Shah warned against them 71
taken to Khwarazm by ‘Abdallah 75
Kildi Muhammad, Qazaq Prince
attacks Tashkent 119, 120, 120n

attacks Ura Tipa 111, 111n
son rebels 121
son takes Andijan 121-2
kindyak 366, 477, 484, 501, 507
Kisten Qara , Abulkhairid 9n, 71
kitaika 368-9, 457, 458, 515, 523
knives 453, 456, 470, 506
Kobyakov Vasilii, Muscovite envoy
on routes to Qazaqs 397
Kochanov Ivan, Muscovite official
tax survey 531, 535
Koda Bik, Mughal envoy
mission to Bukhara in 1654 269
konets, length of material 364n
Korosan, Torgout
besieges Tashkent and Sabran 182

640

Index
korsaki 377-8, 434
koshma 433
kosyak, length of material 365n
kozha bukharskaya 374
kozlina 374
Krijanich Yuri 484
Krushchev, Verkhotur'e voevoda
518

517,

Kuchik Bi, Bukharan envoy
sent to India 283
Kuchuk Khan of Bashkiria
threat to khanate? 297
Kuchum, Siberian ruler 68, 80

asks “Abdallah for help 86
asks for Bukharan clerics 50, 50n,
502
attacks Muscovite settlers 502
Bukharan contacts 80, 90, 90n
causes Ermak's death 50
censured by ‘Abdallah II 91
death 110
descendants attack Siberia 205
descendants trade in khanate 430

exchanges gifts with ‘Abdallah 502
Fedor I's plots against him 80, 87
followers go to Bukhara 91
plans attack on Siberia? 505, 505n
quarrel with Muscovy 502-4
seeks refuge in Bukhara 91
Kuchumites 142n, 502, 510
Kuisha, Derbet Qalmaq
attacked by Imam Quli in 1635 183
attacks Tara 183
Kazi Kaziev trades at his camp 364
location of encampment 411
on route to Siberia 399
sells slaves in Bukhara 430
threatens further attack on Tara 510
Kulab 173, 186
Kula Berdeiko, Bukharan dyer 484
Kundelen, Khoshout Qalmaq
refuses to fight khanate 220
sends Bukharan envoys to Ufa 430
Kupak, Balkh envoy
first mission to India 283
second mission 284
kupchina, kupchiny 419, 475, 489 and
ass.
Kurakin, Tobol'sk voevoda 508, 516
kurdyuk 432
kutnya 369-70, 370n
Kuzai Nughai, Bukharan envoy
audience 224
despatched from Bukhara 221
food allowance 224-5
gifts for tsar 224
leaves Astrakhan 224, 243

letter for Nadir M. 225-6
letter for tsar 221-2
marries in Astrakhan 224
mission to Muscovy 221-2, 223-6,
243
presents from tsar 226n, 323n
takes back slaves 226
Laboznoi Sergei, Muscovite trader 500,
501
Laghaman, Afghan tribe 173
lal (lal) 459
lambskins 373, 431, 441
lan 386n, 455
land sales in khanate 419-20
lapis lazuli 280, 386, 441, 453, 456
livestock 379, 431, 432, 433, 436,
441, 448, 455, 514
Lorenzo Bernardo, Venetian envoy
on Bukharo-Ottoman collusion 51
Louzan, Torgout Qalmaq

besieges Tashkent and Sabran 182
embassy to Nadir Muhammad 215
refuses to fight Bukhara 220
relations with khanate 215, 429
threatens to sell Muscovite envoy in
Bukhara 220
welcomes Khwajah Ibrahim 195
Lyalin Fedor, tobacco producer 535n
lyatchina 457
Mahabat Khan, Mughal amir
kidnaps Jahangir 171
Mahmud b. Wali 403, 404
Mahmid Bi Qataghan, Balkh amir
appointed to Qunduz 349
asks for M. Mugim 353, 357
ataliq 339? 350
becomes ruler of province 362
campaign to Badakhshan 352
demands post 359
fights Subhan Quli 356
difficulties 353-4
fights rebels 350, 351, 356
fights Khwarazmians 334, 336?,
341?, 344, 351
governor of Balkh 350
installs Salih Khwajah 355
peace with Subhan Quli 357
refuses to see Subhan Quli 349

seizes Balkh 355
sent to Qunduz 338n, 339
takes part Dabusi battle 336
tries to seize Badakhshan 350
Mahmid Sultan, Janibegid
supports Muhammad Ibrahim 111
Mahmid Sultan of Wazir
envoy to Muscovy in 1589 60
sons refuse entry to Baba Sultan 75

Index
Mahmud Sultan (continued)

supplies soldiers to “Abdallah 53
Mahtambai, Khwarazmian envoy 437
Maimana 10, 115
attacked by Iran 359
attacked by Rustam Muhammad 158
governor
asks help against pretender 125

flees before Rustam M. 136
attacks Maruchaq 177
Kafsh Qalmagq killed nearby 259
siege by Nadir M. 238, 247, 247n
Malen'kii Semen, Muscovite envoy
travels via khanate 494, 494n
Malik Mahmid, Sistani Prince
marries daughter to Muzaffar Husain
66
Malik Mu’azzam, Sistani Prince
mission to India 96-7
mission to Iran 88
Mambet Murat, Bukharan envoy 215
mann - see batman
Mangits, see Noghays
Mansur Hajji, Bukharan amir
back from India 198
defects to the Mughals 239
on Mughal withdrawal 197-8
parwanchi to Nadir M. 126, 193n
sent to defend Balkh 126
visit requested by Shah Jahan 193
Mansurov A., Bukharan trader 434
Manucci, Italian traveller 418, 444 and
pass.
Manuchihr Beg, Iranian envoy
sent to India by Shah 94
Maruchaq
attacked by Husam Khan 271, 273
attacked by Qasim Muhammad 271

attacked by Uraz Biin 1629 177
besieged by ‘Abd al-‘Aziz 179
fortified by Shah in 1602 117
nearby attack by Fulad Sarai 266
Marw
‘Abd al-Mu’ min visits father 92
annexed by Shah ‘Abbas 113
attacked by Yalangtiish 142-3
Baqi M. writes to governor 114
besieged by ‘Abdallah 20
besieged by Khishika Bi 347
held by Iran 53
ravaged by Anusha 286
ravaged by order of Wali M. 126
retaken by Nir Muhammad 104-5
seized by “Abdallah in 1592 69
Mashhad
appointment of Sulaiman Khalifa 66
appointment of ‘Ummat Khan 59

642

attacked by
“Abd al-‘Aziz and Anusha 285
Yalangtush 143
besieged by ‘Abdallah 59
falls to ‘Abd al-Mu’min 63
Matveev Artamon, secretary of Duma
interviews Hajji Farrukh 307-8
interviews Mulla Farrukh 302-3
Matyunin Yurii, Muscovite envoy
sent to ‘Abdallah 30
Maulana ‘Abd al-Ghafur, Balkh envoy
mission to Shah Jahan 192-4
Maulana Qara, Qul Baba's protégé
forces patron to go to Balkh 96
Maulawi Husaini, Bukharan envoy
death in India 68
sent to Akbar in 1590 67
medicinal herbs 382-3, 451, 459
Mehdi Khan, Iranian envoy
sent to Bukhara 290
Mehdi Khwajah, Balkh envoy
sent to Iran 256
Mehmet III, Ottoman ruler
accession 79
circumcision 43
congratulated on victories 94
letters to ‘Abdallah 89, 105n
sends help to Baqi Muhammad 118
sent the keys of Khurasan 105
Mehmet IV, Ottoman ruler
intercedes for Nadir M. 257
refuses to help ‘Abd al-‘Aziz 324
refuses to see Uzbeg envoys 305
Mehrab Khan, governor of Marw
defeats Bukharan troops 145
mel' 373, 502
Mikhail, ruler of Muscovy
accession 140
answers request for Noghays 225-6
death 242
demands good treatment for traders
472, 473, 474
demands respect in Central Asia 149
detains Central Asian envoys 165
embassies from Balkh 195-6, 202,
212-3
embassies from Bukhara 139-42,
147-8, 155-7, 165, 182-3
embassies to Bukhara 148-58, 204,
508
gerfalcons to Bukhara 148, 226
hostile towards Khozziyan 202
ignores plight of Hajji Ata Quli 183
interest in Siberian trade 508, 509
letters to Nadir M. 213, 225-6
loses Smolensk to Poland 183
orders census of teziki 474

Index

Mikhail (continued)
refuses gerfalcons to Bukhara 165
requests captives from khanate 148
restricts access to Moscow 470-2
Mikita, Pazukhin's interpreter 297
military supplies 390, 390n, 434, 438,
456, 508, 517, 158
- See also zapovednye
Miloslavskii, Astrakhan voevoda 315
Mir ‘Abd al-Rahman Khwajah
;
takes Subhan Q. letter to Delhi 336
Mirak Husain Khafi, Mughal envoy
back in India 192
embassy to Balkh 186-7, 190
Miran Sadr Jahan, Mughal envoy
first mission to khanate 54, 55-8
second mission 175-6
Mir ‘Aziz, envoy of Dara Shikih
mentioned by Aurangzib 247
mission to “Abd al-‘Aziz 265, 269
missions to Nadir M. 209-10, 210n,
240, 247
mir bahri, Indian tax 445
Mir Birkah, Mughal envoy
accompanies ‘Abd al-Rahim to India
in 1626 170, 170n
gifts to ‘Abd al-Rahim in 1622 163
missions to Bukhara 151, 163, 164,
201, 201n
Mir Muhammad Ma’sim, Mughal envoy
mission to khanate 89
Mir Quraish, Bukharan envoy
abortive second mission 891, 92n
first mission to India 50, 52, 53, 54
message for Akbar 54
reception in India 54
route to India 402
mirrors 389, 457, 500, 500n
Mir Shihab al-Din, Balkh envoy
mission to India 298

Mirza Ibrahim of Badakhshan
executed in Balkh 15
Kashghariyans condole on death 48
Mirza Jaqq Haqq, khanate official
sent on reconnaissance in 1611 132
Mirza Khwajah, Bukharan envoy
sent to Iran 72
Mirza Muhammad Zaman, Badakhshani
installed by Baqi M.? 118n
Mirza Nadir, Balkh official
sent to Iran 167
Mirza Shahrukh, see Shahrukh

Mirza Sulaiman, Badakhshan ruler
asks help from Akbar c. 1576 27
condolences to ‘Abdallahh 45
connection with Akbar 15n
defeated by ‘Abdallah in 1560 15
defeats Shahrukh 34
early history 15
embassies to ‘Abdallah 32, 39
flees to India 49
goes to Bukhara for help 40, 40n
supports Din M. of Balkh 24
tries to
annex Kabul 17
propitiate ‘Abdallah 25
reconquer Badakhshan 47-8, 49
Mirza Wali, Mughal amir
puts Payanda Khan to death 119
mithgal, measure of weight 416, 416n
mitkal'’ 366, 367, 501
Monchak, Torgout Qalmaq 296, 296n
Mongols 428-9
Mosal'skii, Tara voevoda 506, 507
mostovshchitsa, M. tax 480, 480n,
482
Mu‘azzam, Mughal Prince 324
Mughal campaign to Balkh
arrive at Balkh 236
back in Kabul 253
capture Kahmard 234
cost of campaign 253, 253n
harassed by Alman 245-8
seize Nadir M.'s possessions 239

Mir ‘Uzzat Ullah 404, 406
Mir Yar Bik of Badakhshan 352
Mirza “Ali Bik, Iranian envoy
sent to Wali Muhammad 128
Mirza Amin, Subhan Quli's envoy
parleys with Sadiq Muhammad 338
Mirza Bik, governor of Bukhara
bullies Khokhlov 152
death 154
Mirza Filad, Mughal envoy
first mission to khanate 27-8, 29
received by ‘Abdallah 29
second mission 30
Mirza Hasan, Badakhshan pretender
first rebellion in 1606 124
put to death 125, 125n
second rebellion 125

set off for khanate 234
survey route 233
Muhammad Akbar, Mughal Prince
driven to mountains 341, 341n
finds asylum in Iran 343
Muhammad ‘Ali, Bukharan envoy 469
carries dye to Muscovy 451
complains of malpractices 60
embassies to Moscow 50-1, 50n,
60-1
items taken back 60, 418
Muhammad Amin, Kashghariyan ruler
asks for help against Qirghiz 348

643

Index

rebellions against him 42
relinquishes power to Hamza 55
Muhammad Latif, Balkh envoy
first mission to India 261
second mission 263
Muhammad Mu‘azzam, see Mu‘azzam
Muhammad Mu’min, Suyunchid
appointed to Andijan 30
area governed extended 35
extradition requested 52
given Shahr-i sabz 42
rebels 43
Muhammad Muaim, ruler of Balkh
date of birth 340n
displeases grandfather? 361, 362
dispute with ‘Ubaidallah’ 362
invites Mahmud Bi into Balkh 360
kept in Bukhara 354
murdered 362
sent to rule Balkh 358
taken to Bukhara 340
» Muhammad Murad Bi, Balkh envoy
mission to India 259, 261
Muhammad Mustafa, Bukharan envoy
sent to Iran 254
Muhammad Quli ‘Arabgirlu, Iranian
sent to Qul Baba Kukeltash 93, 95
Muhammad Quli Durman, Balkh amir
marches into Khurasan in 1617 144
Muhammad Quli, Khwarazmian Prince
flees to Noghays 86
forced to fight for Shah 53
seizes Astarabad 65
visits Muscovy 86n

Muhammad Amin (continued)
death 348
first embassy to Subhan Quli 340
second embassy 348
Muhammad Baqi Bi, khanate official
appointed to Samarqand 96
kills “Abdallah? 95, 95n
Muhammad Baqi Bi, Qalmaq Bukharan
attacks Mazandaran in 1617 144
chases Qazags from Tashkent in
1606 124-5, 124n
defects to Imam Quli 129
fights pretenders in 1607 126
sent against Qazaqs in 1608 128
sent to defend Balkh province 126
Muhammad Bik Qipchaq, Balkh amir
named to Hisar 230
Muhammad Hakim, Mughal Prince
challenges Akbar for the throne 33
condoles with ‘Abdallah 45
death 50
defeats Shahrukh 34
embassy to “Abdallah in 1580 32
gives army to Mirza Sulaiman 49
marries the mirza's daughter 17
Muhammad Ibrahim, Janibegid Prince?
captured by Iranians 105
death 111, 111n
enters Balkh 109
parentage 105
requested by Bani-yi ‘Uzma 108
requested by Pir Muhammad 106
sends on Nur M.'s letters 113
sent to Marv and Mashhad 106,108
-see also Muhammad Sultan,
Bukharan Prince
Muhammad Ibrahim, Khwarazmian
besieged in Wazir 75
robs Turkish envoy Salah Shah 68
Muhammad Jan Bi Yuz, Balkh amir
appointed to Balkh 339, 339n
becomes blind 349
helps fight Anusha 334, 337, 337n
leads amirs against Mahmid Bi 352
replaced as Balkh governor 342-3
welcomes Subhan Q. to Balkh 349
Muhammad, Kashghariyan ruler
captures Quraish Sultan 62
fights Bukharan invaders 81
fights Qirghiz 80
sends army against Khudabanda 82
Muhammad Khudabanda, ruler of Iran
accession 43n
appoints Zamindawar ruler 66
arrested 59
besieged in Turbat 19
marches to Khurasan 44, 52

Muhammad Rahim Bi, Bukharan amir

leads army against Anusha 335
Muhammad Sadiq Khwajah, Jiibari
sent back from India 175
Muhammad Sa‘id, Bukharan envoy
sent to India 284
Muhammad Sa‘id Khwajah, Balkh amir
abandons Mahmud Bi 352
advises march on Balkh 342, 342n
father expelled from Balkh 338
leads army to Bala Murghab 344
parleys with Mahmid Bi 349
sent to fight Anusha 334, 335, 337n
sent on reconnaissance 337

takes part in Dabusi battle 336
welcomes Subhan Q. in 1693 349
Muhammad Salih Bik, Iranian envoy
first embassy to Balkh 159-60, 161
second embassy 163
Muhammad Salim, son of Pir M. II
installed in Andkhud in 1602 116
disappears in 1607 126
promised Shah's help 113

644

Index

Muhammad Salim (continued)
taken to Balkh in 1599 107
taken to Iranin 1601 112
victorious 126
Muhammad Shaibani, ruler of khanate
avenged by ‘Abd al-Mu’min 64
conquers khanate 3
fights Qazags 20
forbids Qazaq trade 432
killed by Shah Isma‘il 3, 101
skull used as drinking-cup 14
Muhammad Sharif, Bukharan envoy
first mission to India 300
second mission 330
Muhammad Sultan, Bukharan Prince
defeated by Farhad Khan near
Turbat 100, 100n, 101
Muhammad Sultan, Mughal Prince
in prison 277
welcomes Qasim M. to Balkh 252
Muhammad Yar, son of Turstin Qazaq
helps besiege Tashkent 188
Muhammad Yar Sarai, Bukharan envoy
sent to India 269-70
Muhammad Yar Sultan, Ashtarkhanid
appointed to Andijan 178, 178n
escorts royal ladies to Bukhara 245

self-enforced delay in Siberia 300
son's fate 304, 305, 397n
tries to foster trade 423, 436, 450,
451
Mulla Maksyuto Alimov of Tobol'sk
negotiates with tsar about tax 535
Mulla Salih Bukhari, Bukharan envoy
detained 89
sent to India 78
Mu’ min Bik, Bukharan envoy
sent to India by Imam Quli 201
sent there by Nadir M. 229
Mu’min Bi Yabu, Bukharan envoy
mission to Turkey 348
Mu’ min Sultan, Suyunchid
- see Muhammad Mu’min
Murad III, Ottoman ruler
armies take Qarabagh 59
discourages Bukharan expansion 73
displeased by ‘Abd al-Mu’min 65
envoys and letters to ‘Abdallah 26,
BINS 3.0719
hostile to “Abdallah's envoy 61
promises to support Iran against
Bukhara 74
refuses ‘Abdallah's requests 65
rejects offer of Gilan 74
signs peace with Iran in 1590 65
son's circumcision 43
Murad IV, Ottoman ruler
accession 170
death 203n
embassies to Imam Quli 170
letter from Shah Jahan 190
Murad Bakhsh, Mughal Prince
arrives in Balkh in 1646 236
asks to return to India 239
defeated by Aurangzib 275
execution 279
leaves Balkh 239, 245n
letter to Nadir Muhammad 236
marches to Barbar in 1640 200
ready to fight Nadir M. in 1642 210
receives delegation from Balkh 236
route to Balkh 403, 403n
sent to
Kabul in 1646 234, 234n
Kashmir in 1647 251
tries to cause Badakhshan rebellion
200
Murad, son of ‘Fawakkul
sent to Moscow as hostage 86
Murad Sultan, Qazaq Prince
chased from Shahrukhiya 172
chased from Tashkent 188

Muhammad Yusuf, Bukharan envoy
sent to Iran in 1642 209
Muhammad Zaman, first impostor
Akbar sends him money 67
allegedly ignored by Akbar 90
chased to Kabul in 1594 78
lives with Hazarjat 105n
put to death 105
successes in Badakhshan 67
Muhammad Zaman, second impostor
death 115
recognised by Akbar 105
takes over Badakhshan 105
Muhammad Zaman, Yalangtush envoy
arrives in India 192
mukhayyar 370
Mulla Fadl Allah, Balkh envoy
sent to India 261
Mulla Farrukh, Bukharan envoy
arrives in Moscow 300
audiences 301, 303
complaints 301
death in Tobol'sk 263
despatched to Moscow 291, 296n
food and drinks allowance 300, 301
gifts delivered or received 301-2,
431
items taken back 488, 500, 500n
mission 300-4
on route to Tobol'sk 398

fights Yalangtish 188
holds out against Imam Quli 166

645

Index
Murtada Quli, governor of Herat 286
Murtada Quli, governor of Teheran
welcomes Imam Quli 210
Murtada Quli Pornak, Iranian amir
conflict with ‘Ali Quli of Herat 43
joins Shah against ‘Ali Quli 52
Murtada Quli Qajar, governor of Marw
anxious about Balkh army 181
captured en route for Marw 179
entertains Imam Quli 208
released by Imam Quli 180
reports on Bukharan success 182
Murshid Quli Ustajla, Iranian amir
arranges marriage for “Abbas 59
assassination 59
feud with ‘Ali Quli Khan Shamlt 52
sends no help to Herat 56
takes custody of ‘Abbas Mirza 52
Muscovite missions to Bukhara 13, 25,
51, 60, 291, 494
- see also Daudov, Gribov,
Khokhlov, Pazukhin
Muscovite merchants
complain about Central Asians 401
complain about foreigners 476-7,
493
in Siberia 536-42
trade practices 462-3
trade with Bukhara 500, 501
Muscovite missions to the Qazaqs
in 1669 291
in 1695 354, 397-8, 434
Muscovites arrested in Khiva in 1646
arrest justified 170
compensation demanded 267, 270
goods seized 500
merchants involved 499-500
Muscovy Company 1, 478
- see also English, Jenkinson
Musi Sultan, Khwarazmian ruler
appointed in 1700-1 360
musk 385, 432, 442, 448, 450, 458,
514, 526, 540
Mustafa I, Ottoman ruler
deposed 146
first accession in 1617 145
second accession 162
toppled 170
Mustafa Khan Kangarli, Iranian amir
death 76
fights Bukharans in 1590 67
retakes Tun 76
sends Bukharan heads to Shah 76
Mustafa Khan Khafi, Mughal envoy
gifts for khans 284
sent back to India 289
sent to the khanate 283

Mustafa Shawush, Ottoman envoy
mission to Bukhara in 1580 51
Mustafa Shawush, Ottoman envoy
sent to Bukhara in 1691-2 347-8
Muzaffar Husain, envoy of Dara Shikth
arrives in Balkh 196
sent back 198
Muzaffar Husain, ruler of Qandahar
besieged by Din Muhammad 77
helps brother against Sistan 66
marries Sistani princess 66
mission from ‘Abdallah 77, 77n
seizes Zamindawarr 66
surrenders Qandahar to Akbar 77
Muzaffar Sultan, son of Jawanmard
captured in 1582 42n
tebels in 1578 28

myt', M. tax 482
mytnaya 466, 467, 467n, 471, 479
Nabahra Bi, Balkh envoy

embassy to India 185, 186
~ Nad ‘Ali Bik, Mughal envoy
sent to khanate 261
Nadir Bahadur, Khwarazmian envoy
accuses Daudov 319-20
requests port at Mangishlaq 325n
Nadir Bi, Bukharan envoy
mission to India 345, 346
Nadir Bi Turkmen, Balkh amir
appointed diwanbegi 356n
kills Aba ’l-Manstr 330
rebels against Mahmiid Bi 357
Nadir Bik Shawa‘it, Balkh envoy
embassy to Marw 177
embassy to India 233, 233n, 234
Nadir diwanbegi Tughai, khanate official
accompanies khan to Mecca 208
advises delay before punishing

Qazags 188
attacks Khurasan in 1617 145, 145n
campaigns to Marw in 1632 179-80
envoy to India 199, 201, 201n
fights Qazaqs 154
nephew goes to live in India 200
pledges allegiance to Nadir M. 208
sent against Qazaqs in 1624 166
Suggests face-saving interview 176
uncle of Imam Quli 145, 145n

wounded by rebels in 1621-2 154
Nadir Muhammad, ruler of khanate

abdication 264
aggressive against India 158, 166,
768
accused of cruelty 208-9, 208n
annexes Khwarazm 216-8
appointed to Balkh 126
appointed to Shahr-i sabz 125

646

Index
Nadir Muhammad (continued)
arrests Subhan Quli 255, 258
arrives in Isfahan 237, 237n
asks for Iranian help 238, 256-7
asks for Ottoman help 257
besieges Duhak and Kabul 173, 174
brother-in-law defects 245
coinage policy 422, 423

refuses to
attack Balkh 248
fight at Hisar 232
help Mughal pretender 181, 200
requests sons from India 259-60
route to Iran in 1646 343
sends
“Abd al-Rahman to Andijan 214
army to Badakhshan 180
army to retake Hisar 232

control over sons 213-4

death 264, 265n
demands Muscovite Noghays 222
disclaims involvement in Yalangtush attacks 167, 169
envoys from Dara Shikuh 170, 181
envoys or letters from Shah Jahan
181, 185, 186-7, 198-9, 235,
240, 261, 262
envoys to
Iran 159, 161, 170, 177, 209,
229, 243, 254, 256, 264
Jahangir 132, 158, 167, 169-70
Muscovy 166, 201-2, 213-4,
221-6
Shah Jahan 180-1, 185, 186,
192-3, 194, 197-8, 199, 201,
2105233, 236, 259,260,261,
262
embassy to Dara Shikth 198
embassy to Louzan 215
embassy to Turkey 257
execution of Baqi Sultan 192
fails to meet Aurangzib 252
fake delight at Mughal arrival 236-7
fights in Badakhshan in 1607 125
fights Qazaqs 131, 139, 154
fights rebels in Andijan 137-8, 139
flees from Balkh in 1646 237
flees to Balkh in 1645 230
forgives ‘Abd al-‘Aziz 179, 185
harem returns from India 261, 261n
helps agriculture 422
helps brother against Wali M. 133
helps Tursun M. 139
intercedes for Abuli's killer 178
invited back to Balkh 246
khutbah in his name 208, 208n
leaves for the Hijaz 264
letter to Murad Bakhsh 236
marches to Gharjistan in 1607 126
negotiates return of Balkh 250-2
on bad terms with Iran 158
plot against him in 1648 258
possessions taken to India 239
preferred to brother 155
reasons for unpopularity 206
receives brother in Balkh

troops to Khurasan

181, 190,

194
splits khanate with son 232
stay in Iran 237-8
taken to Maimana as a child 102

takes revenge on Uraz Bi 233, 233n
unhelpful to Gribov 215, 216, 217
unhinged? 233, 233n
urges tsar against Qalmaq 201n,
411
vilified by Shah Jahan 266
wealth 422
welcomes Razzak Pirdi 127
Nadir Muhammad's mother
alleged negotiations with Iran 160
death 245n
helps defeat pretender 138
taken to Bukhara in 1646 240n
Nadir Nadirlikov, Khwarazmian envoy
takes Indian goods to Moscow 244
Nadir Shah, ruler of Iran 400
Nadr Bi Barati, Bukharan amir

appointed to Balkh 213
pledges allegiance to Nadir M. 208
proclaims Sanjar Sultan? 227n
sent to defend Hisar 232
sides with ‘Abd al-‘Aziz 230
supports Sufi Sultan 230
Naqshbandi 4, 89, 151, 355
Narbekov, Russian envoy

report from Iran 285-6, 289
Naryschkin A., Tobol'sk voevoda
on routes to Bukhara 397, 398
nasad 465
Nashchokin, Muscovite envoy
report from Turkey 67
Nauruz Ahmad, ruler of khanate
accession 9
besieges ‘Abdallah at Qarakul 10
death 11, 11n
sons pay homage to Iskandar 18
takes Samarqand 10
weapons from Sultan 11, 42n
Nazar Bi Naiman, amir of ‘Abdallah

appointed governor of Balkh 25
given falcons 43
mission to Akbar 53

127, 132,

154, 166, 195, 197

647

Index

regulations 485-8
relaxation of clauses 488
nukhid 417, 417n, 423n
Nur Jahan, Mughal Queen
sends envoy to khanate 152
Nur Muhammad, Khwarazmian Prince
asks help from ‘Abdallah 69
defeats Iranians at Khabushan 64
exiled to Iran 113
flees to Iran 75, 75n
happy at Iranian Court 75-6

Nazar Bi Naiman, (continued)
replaced by ‘Abd al-Mu’min 42
Nazar Bi Naiman, amir of Imam Quli
marches to Andijan in 1635 187-8
Nazar Kukeltash, khanate official
ataliq to Imam Quli 127, 127n
Nazar Malik, Khwarazmian envoy
Customs dues reimbursed. 225
returned to Bukhara in 1643? 217-8,
218n
sent to Muscovy in 1641 204

hated by other Princes 22

Nazar Muhammad, Balkh envoy

ignores Shah's summons 108,
108n, 113
loses patrimony
to ‘Abdallah 68, 75
to Hajjim Khan 69., 70
to Shah in 1600 113
offers allegiance to ‘Abdallah 70
regains patrimony in 1598 104-5
sends on khanate messages 106
warns against Shah 113
obrok 480, 497, 497n, 498, 512, 513,
513n, 528, 528n, 529, 531, 532,
536, 539
ob'yar 451
Ochirtu, Khoshout chief 454
Odoevskii Ivan, Kazan’ voevoda 471-3
Odoevskii N., Astrakhan voevoda 204
Odoevskii Yakov, Astrakhan voevoda
488, 490, 491
‘old’ coins
in India 446, 447
in khanate 415, 417, 418, 420,
421, 423
Ombo Erdeni, Mongol chief
attacks Turkestan 220
ordo-bazarnaya stanitsa 395
Ordyn-Nashchokin 292, 484
os'mnichee, M. tax 480n
Ostyaks 506, 518
ot'ezzhaya, ot'ez, M. tax 515, 517,
527;,527n, 5315537,
Ottomans 490
attack Astrakhan 23
attack Iran 59, 121, 146
fail to retake Baghdad 170
letters to Imam Quli 144, 170
plan attack on Moscow in 1678 324
Prince sheltered by Iran 18
seek help against Austria 79
otvoznaya, ot'yavochnaya, M. tax
468, 468n, 475, 479
Ozerov Ftoroi, Muscovite trader
goes to Bukhara 506
pandari, Indian tax 446
paper 389, 441-2, 459

sent to India 261
Nazar Muhammad, Bukharan envoy
in Khiva 293
sent to Muscovy 291
Nazar Pakul, Khwarazmian envoy 475
Nazar Sultan, Qazaq Prince
leads 1635 rebellion 187
Nikitin G.R., gost’ 538

Nikitnikov Grigorii, gost’ 499, 500n
Nishapur
falls to ‘Abd al-Mu’min 64, 76
returns to Shah ‘Abbas 71
Nizam al-Din Jawim Bi, see Jadum Bi
Noghays
accept Abu ’1-Khair as ruler 29
ask Tsar for new chief 149
attacked by Torgout and Qazaqs 182
camping-grounds 29, 410-1
complain about slave-traders 478
forbidden relations with Bukhara
111, 268, 282-3, 283n, 483
hostile towards khanate 48
khutbah in name of ‘Abdallah 39
not to be harassed in Muscovy 474
not to be sold as slaves 489, 493
on good terms with ‘Abdallah 54,
68-9, 78
origin 29
possible alliance with Kuchum 91
related to Kuchum 504
release demanded by Nadir M. 221,
222
sell Muscovites to Bukhara 362
send Khwarazmian Prince to
Moscow 86
sold in Bukhara 48
trading activities 427-8
watched in Muscovy and Siberia
473, 505
welcome Baba Sultan 41
welcomed in Siberia 86-7, 503,
504, 506
yearly horse fair 395, 481
Novotorgovyi ustav of 1667
aims 290-1, 484-5

648

Index
Parwiz, Mughal Prince
death 171
sent to fight Udaipur 123
pauzki 394
Payanda chihra aqasi, Bukharan envoy
first mission to Iran 159
second mission 161, 161n
Payanda Muhammad, Ashtarkhanid
appointed to Tashkent in 1606 125
Payanda Sultan/Khan °
put to death in India 119, 119n
Pazukhin Boris, Muscovite envoy
aims of mission 292, 488
arrives in Bukhara 294
audiences 295, 296
captives ransomed 297
departs from Moscow 291
gifts delivered 295
goods taken 293
information gathered 297-8, 437
mission to Bukhara 291-8
return journey 298, 400n
salary 519n
stay in Khwarazm 293-4
pearls 387, 451, 459
pechatnaya, M. tax 537, 537n
pechatnaya rublevaya poshlina, M. tax
541
Pehlewan Quli, Khwarazmian envoy
detained in Moscow 290, 298n
perekupnaya, M. tax 538, 539, 540
perevoz, perevozy, M. tax 480, 482
Perfil'ev Ivan, Muscovite envoy
mission to China 273-4
Persian lamb 375-6
pesets, pestsy 378, 378n
pestred’ 370
Peter the Great, ruler of Muscovy
demands fair treatment for traders
496, 522, 530, 533, 539, 540-1
policy towards Siberian Bukharans
528-9, 531-2, 535
punishes Qazaqs 533
regulates tobacco trade 495, 522,
525-7, 528, 529-30, 531, 532,
533, 534-5

campaign to Mashhad 18
death 18, 18n
execution of Mirza Ibrahim 15
offers exchange of appanages 16
receives gifts from Iran 17
seizes Bukhara in 1550 8
stops ‘Abdallah campaigning in
Khurasan 15, 16
surrenders Bukhara to Yar M. 9
Pir Muhammad II, ruler of khanate
accession 99
appoints Baqi M. to Samarqand 103
asks for Muhammad Ibrahim 106
confirms ‘Abd al-Amin in Balkh 99

death 106-7, 107n
dispute with Baqi M. 106
fights Tawakkul 102, 103
Pir Muhammad Qunghrat, Bukharan
sent to Shah 71
Pir Muhammad Sultan, Qazaq Prince
appointed governor of Tashkent 175

death 178
pischee, M. tax 467
plums, see Bukharan plums
poambarnoe, M. tax 536, 536n
podat', M. tax 497, 498
pod'emnaya, M. tax 466
pogolovshchina M. tax 464n, 536n
Poland, Poles 140, 149, 157, 183, 282,
292, 292n, 324, 340, 353
pokorechnoe, M. tax 480n
polavochnaya, M. tax 461, 461n
polovinka, measure of material 373n
polozovaya, M. tax 465, 482, 536n
pomernoe, M. tax 466-7, 467n
pominki
definition 147
required by Tsar Aleksei 309-10
taken by Pazukhin 311
wanted by ‘Abd al-‘Aziz 307
Poppe Matvei, rhubarb monopolist 524
porcelain 429, 435, 448, 448n, 452,
459
portishch, measure of material 373n
poryadnoe, M. tax 480n
posad 496, 497, 504, 504n
posadskii chelovek, posadskie lyudi
471, 529, 537
definition and obligations 496-7,
497n, 499, 513, 520, 538
difficulties 497-8
posazhennaya, posazhennoe, M. tax
465, 482, 536, 536n
posherstnoe, M. tax 467n
postoinyi, M. tax 489
povodnaya den'ga, M. tax 467nn
povorotnaya, M. tax 465, 465n

regulates trade in Muscovy 494-6
regulates trade in Siberia 522-42
reinforces zapovednye rules 495
seeks monopoly of Chinese trade
522, 523, 528, 531, 533-4, 542

simplifies Siberian taxes 536
Petrov Tomilo, Muscovite envoy
received by Derbet Dalai 431
Pir Hajji Bik, Khurasan envoy 52
Pir Muhammad I, ruler of khanate
accession 11

649

Index
exempted from dues on Yaik 492
feared in Siberia 511
fight Bukharans in 1658? 274
fight Qazaqs 20, 219, 220, 244,
B31
goods taken to China 453
gostinyi dvor 517, 517n
guide Pazukhin to Bukhara 293
help fight Mughals in 1639 196
help Turstn M.'s rivals 139
internecine fighting 291, 300
kill Siberian Bukharans 510
merchants killed 521
presents from Muscovites 273, 311
raid Khwarazm 142, 158
raid Noghays 142
rob Seitkul Ablin 274
slaves in Muscovy 483
trade in China 205
trade restricted in Siberia 532, 534
trade with Bukhara 215, 429
.
tribal groups 142n
Qandahar
“Abdallah's soldiers fight nearby 56
besieged by
Aurangzib 260, 261, 265-6
Dara Shikth 268
Din Muhammad 77
convoy robbed 287
given to Shah Jahan 193
governor turns against Shah 290
help with recapture offered 254-5
Khusrau reluctant to defend it 163
Mughal loss hinted at 30
seized by ‘Abbas I in 1622 160
seized by ‘Abbas II in 1649 258
surrendered to India in 1595 77, 84
Qaqchi tribe
killers of Din Muhammad? 101
Qara Batur Hajji, Bukharan envoy
arrives in Khiva 318

precious stones

386-7, 429, 435, 448,
451, 453, 456, 459, 488, 515, 523,
542
- see also jade, lapis, pearls
pristay, pristavy 243, 465, 471
prival'noe, M. tax 482
privorotnoe, M. tax 536n

privyaznoe, M. tax 467n
problems of Muslims in Muscovy and
Siberia 19, 23, 462, 492, 519, 520,
534
proezhdeva, M. tax 468
proezzhaya gramota, proezzhie.
needed in Muscovy 473, 496
required in Siberia 531
- see also transit passes
proezzhaya poshlina, M. tax
468, 471, 475, 480, 481, 486, 497,
53/,535/0
promysel 509n, 513
promyshlennye lyudi 540
propusknaya, see proezzhaya poshlina
Prozorovskii, voevoda 292-3
pudovshchitsa, M. tax 466, 479
Pul-i Salar battle 101
Pulad Sultan, Khwarazmian Prince
besieged in Khiva 27
chased from Wazir 75
embassies to ‘Abdallah 37, 48
Punchuk, Torgout Qalmaq 483n
Pushkin Ivan, Tyumen' voevoda 510
pyataya den'ga, pyatye den'gi, M. tax
51355 18nyo35
pyatennoe, M. tax 467
Qadi ‘Abd al-Latif, khanate official
in league with Mughals 196
Qadi ‘Aud Sharif, Bukharan envoy
mission to India 275
Qadi ‘Umar, Balkh official
stay inIndia 192, 195-6
Qalij Bik, Bukharan envoy
mission to India 278
Qalij Khan, Mughal amir
plots attack on khanate

Qarai tribe

killed Din Muhammad? 101
punished by Baqi Muhammad 118n
Qarakul
attacked by Abt ’I1-Ghazi 270, 272
besieged by Nauriz Ahmad 10
lambskins 376
Qaraqalpaqs
attack khanate 122n, 195
best soldiers in khanate 297
definition 196n
expel Khwarazmians 326
threatened by Bashkirs? 297
Toburchuk killed in Khiva 355
Qara Tughma, Bukharan amir

200, 200n

takes Qandahar for Emperor 193
Qalmaq 506, 514, 518, 519, 530, 531
attack
Bukharan merchants 153
khanate in 1633-4 184, 185
Siberia 508, 510, 521
Sighnaq in 1608 127
Tashkent in 1636 188
travellers to Muscovy 291, 325
camping-grounds 411-2
close Emba route 184
congratulations on Herat capture 62
defeated by Mongols 165

builds fort at Chaqcharan 159

650

Index

Qara Tughma (continued)
raids Iranin 1617 144
raids Khurasan in 1614-5 143
Qarshi
“Abdallah under threat 92
besieged by Khusrau Sultan 11
given to Khusrau Sultan 12
Qasim Khan, governor of Kabul 105
Qasim Muhammad, Ashtarkhanid
accepts surrender of Balkh 252, 253
appointed to Khwarazm 223
attacks Maruchaq 271
death 276, 276n
defeated by Abu al-Ghazi? 193
goes to Iran 237
governor of Andkhud 223
intended raid on Maruchaq 273
reprimanded by “Abd al-‘Aziz 273
requests trade with Muscovy 223
sent to fight Subhan Quli 270
sent to besiege Maimana 238
thought to be threatening India 277

urged to attack khanate 270

Qipchaq
harass Subhan Quli 357

rebel against ‘Abd al-‘Aziz 326

rebel against Adil Bi Ming 359
support Mahmud Bi 355
support Rustam M. 136, 138
Qirghiz
fight Kashghariyan ruler 281
at peace with khanate 195
attack
Andijan in 1642 214
Kashghar 80, 348
Kulab in 1640 201
Tashkent in 1603 120
camping-grounds 412
congratulations on Herat capture 60
crushed by ‘Abd al-*Aziz 173
friendly message to ‘Abdallah 37
help fight Mughals 196
help Kildi M. against khanate 120
march on Hisar in 1587 56-7
settle in Hisar in 1636 190
trade with khanate? 429
Qrim 348
Qul Baba Kikeltash, Bukharan amir
appointed to Herat 58
builds medresseh in Taligan 47
concern about Mughals 84. 84n
death 96
embassies to Iran 87, 92-3, 95, 95n
hostile to ‘Abd al-Mu’min 92, 92n
investigates Samarqand tax 52
invites ‘Abd al-Mu’min to Herat 92
mission to Baba Sultan 38
receives gift from India 57
sent against Sulaiman Khalifa 67
sent to attack Mashhad 63
Sistanis pay tribute 87
summoned against Tawakkul 94
Qul Muhammad, Khwarazmian ruler
accession confirmed 355
Qulim Hajji, Bukharan envoy
sent to Iran 277
qumash 366, 366n, 450
Quraish Sultan, Kashghariyan Prince
rebels against ‘Abd al-Karim 62
travels through Balkh 63
Qurama tribe 355, 355n, 356, 359

truce with Subhan Quli 270
Qasim Sultan, Suyanchid
pays homage to Iskandar

Qazags
agreement with Baba Sultan 33

attack khanate 12, 33, 34, 49, 56,
79, 80, 94, 103, 111, 120, 122,
1227 5123..104.125,5 127.131,
136, 137, 151, 166, 169, 182,
186, 188, 191-2, 246, 266, 342
attack Muscovite Siberia 354, 532,
533
best soldiers in khanate 297
camping-grounds 20, 396-7, 410
defeat Uzbegs 137n, 154
embassyto ‘Abdallah in 1584 48

fall out with Baba Sultan in 1580 36
fearsome appearance 21
fight Torgouts 188n
given Tashkent 103
help fight Mughals 246, 249n
interrupt China trade 20n
kill Qaragalpaq leader 122n
offer captive to ‘Abdallah 32
on good terms with Subhan Quli
336, 354, 354
origins 20
present near Herat in 1592? 72

Qutlug Adam, Bukharan envoy
detained in Muscovy 87
sent back to Bukhara 110
Qutluq Muhammad, Qirghiz chief 214n
Qutluq Muhammad, son of Nadir M.
appointed to Hisar Shadman 214n
defects to ‘Abd al-‘Aziz 248
fights Mughals 248, 249

promise taxes to
Bagi Muhammad in 1604 122

Imam Quli in 1636 189
send soldiers to ‘Abd al-Mu’min 97
Shighai sides with ‘Abdallah 36, 38
towns controlled 336
trade with khanate 432-4

651

Index

rublevaya poshlina, M. tax 479, 536
Ruhallah Beg Dhu ’1-Qadar, Iranian
mission to Balkh 108
rukoznobnaya, tax 466
Russian Ib. 363

Qutluq Muhammad (continued)

flees to Iran 237
put to death 263
sent against Balkh 263, 263n
qutni, see kutnya
Qutush Bahadur, Khwarazmian envoy
return journey 396
sent to Muscovy by Qasim M. 223
rahdari, Indian tax 439, 445, 446
Rahim Bi, Bukharan amir
remains loyal to khan 352
Rahman Khan, Mughal envoy
sent to khanate 261
Rahman Quli Sultan, Ashtarkhanid
fights Pir Muhammad I 107
flees to Bukhara in 1598 102
rebels against Baqi Muhammad 112
Rashid Khan, Kashghariyan ruler
interferes in khanate? 12, 12n
Razin Stenka, Cossack rebel 391
attacks ambassadors 291, 298
attacks Iran 290
mentioned by Shah 310
rebellion comes to an end 304
Razzak Pirdi, Bukharan amir
fights Badakhshan rebel 125
prepares to fight Wali M. 127-8
welcomed to Balkh 127
religious animosity
between Shi‘a and Bukharan Sunnis
14, 14n, 15n
between Ottomans and Iranians 18
religious discrimination 414, 446
retail trade in Muscovy 487, 492, 497
revahie 441
ribat 6, 418, 419
rhubarb
carried by Bukharans 384, 431,
432, 442, 449-50, 452-3
cost 384, 458, 524, 531
description and uses 383-4, 384n
farmed out in Siberia 524
grown by Mongols 428
not esteemed in China 458-9
‘prospected’ for in Siberia 516, 525
quantities carried 384, 514
smuggled into
Moscow 490, 491, 516, 518-9
Siberia 514, 516, 536
trade regulated 518
ukaznyi tovar 513
zapovednyi tovar 482-3, 483n,
514, 524, 526, 531, 532
rogovoe, M. tax 467n
Romodanovskii, Muscovite envoy 110
rouble, its weight and value 386n, 455,
485, 485n

Rustam Bi, Bukharan envoy

embassy to India 289
Rustam, grandson of Nadir Muhammad
taken to India 240
unwilling to leave 260
Rustam Mirza, ruler of Zamindawar
clash with Din Muhammad 76, 77n
conflict with Muzaffar Husain 66,
76-7
defeats Bukharans 66
flees to India 77
hostile to Iran 66

suggested as Khurasan ruler 63
Rustam Muhammad, son of Wali M.
action against cousins 128
attacks retreating Bukharans 180
attacks khanate 135-6, 138, 147,
153, 158
besieged in Qunduz in 1605-6 124
conquers part of Balkh 138
end to attacks requested 158
envoy seen at Iranian Court 141
flees to Herat 138
given Bukharan spoils in 1634 184
goes to relieve Marw in 1632 180
pensioned off in 1623 162
raids
Balkh and Jijektu 135-6
Jijektu in 1632-3 180
Balkh province 179, 180, 180n
seizes Jijektu in 1612 136, 136n
seizes Sarakhs in 1633 181
takes Yalangtush's baggage 146
settles down in Herat 142
Shah ready to support him 207
_ Supporters attack Balkh 136-7
taken to Iran in 1611 129
taken to Mazandaran in 1622 162
told to attack khanate in 1611 130
unharmed by Iranians in 1611 134n
welcomed in Gharjistan 137n
sables 378, 512
carried by Bukharans 442, 456, 502
concessions to Bukharans 521,
0235520

given as rewards 226n, 302, 323,
323n
live export forbidden 490
requested from Kuchum 502
sale forbidden 506, 515, 520, 522,
528, 530, 534, 539
size of furcoat 293n

652

Index
sables (continued)
taken as pominki

Sales taxes

273, 293, 301,

in Muscovy 467, 471, 477, 481,
486, 487
in Siberia 507, 524, 526, 533, 537,
538 540
- see also tamga
Salih dastarkhanchi, Balkh envoy
mission to India 199, 201, 201n
Salih Khwajah, Ashtarkhanid
installed in Balkh 355, 355n
left in charge 356
loses support 357
removed from power 358
Salim, Mughal Prince
accession as Jahangir 123
defended by ‘Abdi‘ Khwajah 121
rebels against father 121n
Salir Turkmen
hostile towards Bukharans 243
Saltykov I, Tobol'sk voevoda 510, 511
Saltykov P., Tobol'sk voevoda 306
Samarqand
accession of ‘Abd al-‘Aziz 228
appointment of
Abi ’1-Khair in 1578 28
‘Tbadallah in 1579 32
Shah Haidar Muhammad 135
attacked by Kuchkinchids 32
capital of Tamerlane 1
seized by
“Abdallah 11, 22, 28, 37
Anusha 335
Babur in 1512-3 3
Kuchkunchids 37, 38
Nauraz Ahmad in 1554 10
Sanjar Sultan, grandson of Imam Quli
executed by ‘Abd al-‘Aziz 230
released by Baqi Yuz 229
taken hostage 226
Saqi Hajji, Bukharan amir
captured at Maruchaq 180
Sarban Sultan, Qazaq Prince
attacks khanate 34
sardaba 418
Sart Taqi, Iranian vizier 193n, 210
Sayyid Mir Muhammad Tahir
land transaction 420
Sayyid Quli, Bukharan envoy
sent to Turkey in 1591 68, 68n
Sayyid ‘Ubaidalla, see ‘Ubaidallah II
sbornye den'gi, M. tax 537
Seidyak Kulmametov of Tobol'sk
287, 288, 428-9
Seit, see Yushan
Seitkul Ablin, Muscovite envoy
arrives in Peking in 1669 288
Bukharans travel with him 430

307, 311
taken to Karagan 500
trade supervised by gosti 499
- See also furs & Bukharan traders
Sabzawar
compromise of 1593-4 76

returns to Shah‘ Abbas in 1592 71
taken by ‘Abd al-Mu’min 69, 85
townspeople masssacred 85
Sa‘dallah Khan, Mughal minister
rdespatched to Balkh 239-40
returns to Kabul 240
sent to Qandahar 258, 266

shows contempt for ‘Abbas II 258
writes to Nadir Muhammad 247
saddles 431, 442
Sadiq Muhammad, Ashtarkhanid
accession in Balkh 330
cruel behaviour 330, 338
death 339, 339n
does not help father 334, 337
executes brothers 338, 338n
prepares to defend Balkh 338
punishes various tribes 330-1
submits to father 338
Sa‘id Khan, Mughal commander 245
Sa‘id Khwajah naqib, see Muhammad
Sa‘id Khwajah
Safi I, ruler of Iran
accession 177
death 210
gives spoils to Rustam M. 184
marches towards Baghdad 194
prepares Qandahar expedition 209
prepares to
discipline ‘Ali Mardan 193, 193n
install Rustam M. in khanate 207
receives Imam Quli in style 209
releases Bukharan prisoners
in 1629 177
in 1632 and 1633 180, 181
told Imam Quli abdicated 205-6
welcomes Nadir M.'s envoy 209
Safi II, ruler of Iran
first accession 286
second accession 287, 287n
- see also Sulaiman I
safyan 373-4
Salah Shah, Ottoman envoy to khanate
reasons for embassy 4451
robbed in Khwarazm 68
sal ammoniac 457
Salei Bahadur, Bukharan envoy
arrival in Astrakhan 223
departure 223, 243

653

Index

Nadir M. 185, 186, 192, 193,
194, 201, 259, 260, 261, 262
embassy from Subhan Quli 261
embassy from Yalangtish 192
embassies to
Imam Quli 175-6, 201
Nadir M. 181, 186-7, 190, 1989, 235, 240, 260
envoy to “Abd al-‘Aziz 269
envoy to ‘Abbas I at Qandahar 160
fails to strengthen Qandahar 257-8

Seitkul Ablin (continued)

goods purchased in China 274,
371, 458
first mission to China in 1653 269
route 410
second mission in 1658-62 273-4
sells Emperor's gift 458
third mission in 1668-71 287
Tsar's instructions in 1658 273-4
Selim II, Ottoman Sultan
expedition to Astrakhan 19, 23
writes to tsar re Bukharans 19, 19n
Senga, Sungar kuntaidzhi
Bukharans work for him 430n
killed in 1671 288
serving-men 504, 509, 518, 538, 359,
359n, 540
- see also sluzhilye lyudi
Shad Khan, Mughal envoy
sent to Balkh 198
takes back pretender 199, 200
Shadman Khwajah, Balkh envoy
mission to India 299, 299n
Shah A‘lam, Mughal Prince 360
Shah Bik, Mughal governor
chases Uzbegs from Qandahar 84
Shah Bik Bi, Bukharan envoy
mission to India 346
Shah Bik Kukeltash, Bukharan amir
ataliq to Nadir M. in 1608 127
killed by Balkh populace 127
governor of Balkh in 1607 125
Shah Haidar Muhammad, Kashghariyan
allowed to retain Khotan in 1594 82
appointed to Samarqand 135
expelled by Shuja‘ al-Din 135
forced to help Muhammad Khan 81
helps rebel in 1594 81
Shah Husain, Balkh trade agent
sent to Muscovy 421
Shahim Bi, Bukharan amir
given falcons by ‘Abdallah 43
Shah Jahan, Mughal Emperor

gift to Imam Quli 234, 234n
gifts to Nadir M.'s sons 240, 262,
265
goes to Kabul 234, 245, 259
ignores “Abd al-*Aziz's peace offer
250
instructions to Murad Bakhsh 235
jests about Imam Quli 175
keen to regain Qandahar 175, 187,
187n, 260, 266.
letters
to ‘Abbas II 234, 241
to Mehmet IV 265-6

orders lifting of Qandahar siege 266
orders start of Badakhshan campaign
in 1646 233
plans attack on Iran 190
plans attack on Khurasan 199
plans Badakhshan attack 200
pleads with Murad Bakhsh 239
prepares to
help Nadir M. against son 255
invade khanate 195, 197-8,
199n, 229, 231, 233
pretexts for invading khanate 234,
240, 241
rebels against father 163, 170
reluctant to defend Qandahar 163
sends
‘Abd al-Rahman to khanate 261
Dara Shiktth to Qandahar 209
money to Nadir M. in 1649 261
under house arrest 275
wants Nadir M.'s humiliation 250
wants triple alliance against Iran 190
will forgive Nadir M. 175
Shah Khwajah, Balkh envoy
mission to India 169-70, 171
Shah Khwajah, khanate official
rebels against Subhan Quli 349

abandons Qandahar siege 261

abortive invasion of 1639 195-8
accession 172
appoints “Ali Mardan to Kabul 229
asks for ‘Ali Mardan's son 254
attitude towards trade 446
celebrates conquest of Balkh 239
condoles with Muhammad Sadiq

Khwajah 175
destruction of Bamian 176
embassies from
‘Abd al-‘Aziz 269, 271-2, 275
Imam Quli 199-200, 201

Shah Muhammad, see Ishim Sultan
Shah Nazar Bik, Iranian official
mehmandar to Nadir M. 264
returns to Iran in 1653 268
sent to Bukhara in 1651 265
Shah Niyaz, Balkh official 358n

654

Index

Shah Niyaz, Khwarazmian ruler
appointed to Khiva 358, 358n
becomes Tsar's vassal 358-9
intercedes on behalf of traders 496
Shah Niyaz Mirza, Noghay
influences Nadir Muhammad 221
Shah Nizam, Badakhshani rebel
marches on Taliqan 57
Shah Quli Bik, Iranian envoy
sent to India 257-8
Shahr-i sabz
appointment of Baba Sultan 22

appointment of Uzbeg Sultan 22
given to Muhammad Mu‘min 42
Khusrau Sultan retires there 11

taken by ‘Ibadallah Sultan 9
Shahriyar, Mughal Prince 171, 172
Shahrukh Mirza, Badakhshani Prince
‘Abdallah complains about him 54
Akbar defends actions 55, 55n
allotted fief far from frontier 90
attacks Balkh in 1579 32
cannot agree with grandfather 39
defeated by Mirza Sulaiman 34
embassies to ‘Abdallah 27, 47
flees towards India in 1584 47, 48
marches on Taliqan 47
mother claims precedence 48
offers partition to grandfather 40
takes part of Badakhshan 27
Shahrukhiya
attacked by Kuchkinchi 32
Bukharans fight Buzah Khwar 37
Qazaqs march there 166
rebellion against ‘Abdallah 56
taken by “Abdallah 41
Shah Sa‘id, Qazaq Prince

appointed to Tashkent

131

replaced by Ishim's son 136
visits Balkh 192n
Shah Shuja‘, Mughal Prince
death 177, 177n, 178
defeated by Aurangzib 275
stops Balkh envoy in 1638 194
Shah Suwar, Balkh envoy
arrives in India 261
dismissed 262
Shaikh Baba, Khwarazmian envoy
buys slaves in Muscovy 226
Customs dues reimbursed 225, 243
delivers letter to Afghan M. 217
leaves Astrakhan for Moscow 224
letter for the Tsar from Bukhara 222
missions to Muscovy 222-6, 244
on Khwarazmo-Indian relations 436
on routes 391, 392n, 402
refuses to land at Karagan 243

son released from Astrakhan 225
Shaikh Darwish, Bukharan envoy
sent to Muscovy 91
Shaikh Husaini, Mughal envoy
dismissed 91, 92, 92n
leaves Qarshi 93
mission to khanate 90
Shamlu, Iranian governor
taken prisoner 162
Shaposhnikov O., Siberian envoy
visits Qazaqs and Bukhara 291
shar'
description 392
- see tobacco for sale restrictions
Sharif Muhammad, Khwarazmian Prince
back in Khwarazm 164, 164n, 172
demands gifts from Khokhlov 150
falls out with Isfandiyar 167
helps fight Abt ’1-Ghazi 172
related to Subhan Quli 270, 270n
seeks refuge in Bukhara 156, 168
Shayasta Khan, Mughal governor
wounded by Shivaji 283
sheep 432, 441, 455
sheepskins 376-7, 432
Sherley brothers 85n
Shighai Khan, Qazaq
advises “Abdallah against danger 40
brother finds ‘Abd al-Mu’min 33
defeated by Baba Sultan 36
finds food for army 40
given Khujand in 1581 38
helps fight Baba Sultan 39-42
offers allegiance to ‘Abdallah 36
Shikhal Khan, see Khan Shikhal
Shishkov, Krasnoyarsk voevoda 521
Shivaji, Maratha chief
death 341n.
rebels in 1670 299
sacks Surat 283
son protects Aurangzib's rival 341,
341n
son put to death 345
supported by Golkonda 345
Shuja‘ al-Din Ahmad, Kasghariyan ruler

exiles Princes to khanate 135
Siberian Bukharans
activities 509, 510, 513
appointed to Customs 521
assessed for tax 528-9, 531-2, 535
complain about officials 512
insult Orthodox faith? 519, 520
moved away from Churches 520
privileges 512, 520
resent enforced hospitality 517
wealth and lifestyle 514-5
Sikandar, ruler of Bijapur 345

Index
released by Central Asian rulers
155,157, 29737
sent as gift to India 169
sluzhba
required from posadkie lyudi 497
sluzhilye lyudi 497, 498, 503, 508
snosnaya, snosnye, M. tax 471, 471n
soft goods 471, 471n
Sophia, Regent of Muscovy
concessions to Bukharans 521
embassy to khanate 340
extends privileges of Siberian
Bukharans 520
fights corruption and smuggling
519
plans new traders' inns 492

silk 501, 507
Armenian monopoly 292, 443
bought by Bukharans 437, 443,
458
cost 302, 302n, 309, 309n, 437
information required 309
khanate and Khivan production 298
taxed in Khiva 298
types 370-3, 458
silver
carried by Bukharans 441, 442,
443, 448, 450, 451, 452
coins as trade items 485
dishes required by ‘Abdallah 418
exported from China 459
exported from Muscovy 489
rate of exchange 484, 485
required for tax payment 485-7, 496
shortages in Muscovy 484n
use in China 455
value demanded by tsar 542
- see also zapovednye
Sinan Pasha, Ottoman amir
victories against Kafirs 79
Sistan
appeals to Akbar 88, 96-7
appeals to Iran 88
attacked by Bukharans in 1588 59
attacked by Rustam Mirza 66
attack on Sabz 97
pays taxes to Bukhara 77, 87
Skibin Fedor, Muscovite envoy
detained in Turkestan 354
on routes to Siberia 397, 398
on trade 434

reduces rate of obrok 536
re-Siting of Muslim houses 493,
520
stops access to Moscow
stops immigration 492

492-3, 494

welcomes Bukharans in eastern
Siberia 521
Sorokin Ivan, busa captain 414, 499
Spatharii N., Muscovite envoy
route to China 409-10, 455, 456
spinel 352, 386, 435, 449
stamed 373
stamp duty 541n
- see also pechatnaya
Stepanov Vel'yamin, Muscovite envoy
mission to Qazaqs 396-7
Strel'tsy 301, 315
Stroganov G.D, tobacco monopolist
528, 529
Stroganov, Siberian colonisers 465,
502, 500, 503

slaves

bought by khanate envoys 60, 226
cost 156, 253, 380, 451, 457
dealt in by Bukharans 379, 427,
434, 437, 443, 450, 451, 452
export forbidden from
Iran 440
Muscovy 469-70, 478, 478n
Siberia 522
happy in khanate? 303
ill-treated by Khwarazmians 437
occupation in khanate 434
offered to Tsar by Imam Quli 147
origin 427, 428, 431, 432
purchase at Yamysh forbidden 533
ransomed by ambassadors 155-6,
157, 221, 222, 222n, 297, 306,
317-8, 319
ransoming instructions 148-9
regulations in Muscovy 61, 469-70,
478, 478n, 483, 489, 490, 493,
495, 533

strug 394

Subhan Quli, ruler of khanate
accession 329
agricultural decline during reign 360
alliance with
Qalmaq against father 263
Qazags against khanate 263, 270

angry with Shah Sulaiman 343
appointed governor of Kahmard
213
appoints Musi Sultan 360
appoints Shah Niyaz 358
arrested by father 255, 258
asks Khwarazm to attack khanate
270, 305, 318
at peace with khan 277, 296, 305
attacks
‘Abd al-‘Aziz 296n, 305, 316
Khurasan 270, 343-4, 346-7
Mughals in 1647 248

656

Index
Subhan Quli (continued)

offers daughter to Anusha 318
offers to help Muscovite-Mughal
relations 298
orders execution of
Abu ’1-Mansur in 1683? 330
Khwarazmian envoy 351

attitude to one-third rule 425
attitude towards agriculture 425
attitude towards trade 424
avoids fighting Anusha 334
Balkh appointments
Iskandar 329
Jadum Bi ? 342
Mahmud Bi 350 .
Muhammad Jan Bi Yuz 294
Muhammad Muqim 358
bars Mughal from Samarqand 342
becomes Khwarazm suzerain 355
besieges Balkh 263, 338, 356
bribes Qazaqs to attack brother 268
brother seeks help against 318, 324
changes sides 259, 260
coinage policy 343, 343n, 425
colludes with Ayuka? 344
death 361
does not pursue Anusha 332
embassies from
India 283-4, 299, 340
Iran 277, 348
Kashghariya 340-1, 348
Khwarazm 340, 351, 353, 358,
360
Muscovy 297, 340
Turkey 346, 347
embassies or letters to Moscow and
Siberia 322-3, 355, 360, 397
embassies to
Aurangzib 278, 281, 283, 284,
289, 298-9, 323-4, 325, 330,
336, 345, 346, 360
Iran 276, 281, 286?, 305-6,
330, 333, 348, 353, 353n, 360
Shah Jahan 261, 271
Turkey 346
embassy from ‘Qrim’ 348
enforces return of stolen goods 354
expeditions to Balkh
in 1684 338-9
in 1688 342-3
in 1693 349
in 1696 356-7
fights ‘Abd al-‘Aziz 294, 305, 316
fights Mughals 237, 245, 248, 249
financial policy 424-5
financial situation 348
flees Balkh with father 237
founds hospital 361
interferes with Bukharo-Indian
relations 271, 275, 277
marches on Bukhara in 1681 326
negotiates with rebels 351
negotiates with son 338

Qasim Muhammad in 1659 276

Qutluq Muhammad c.1651? 263
Sadiq Muhammad in 1685 339
peace with
Mahmid Bi in 1696 357
Shah Sulaiman c.1692 348
plot in his favour in 1649 258
rebellions during his reign 338,
349, 350-1, 359
refuses to
accept Muscovite captives 349
meet brother 327
see father 264
reprisals against Samarqand? 336
seizes Tirmidh from Mughals 245
sends heads of rebels to father 260
sent to
defend Hisar 230
propitiate Mughals 236
retake Hisar 232
take Khulm from father 255
take Maimana from brother 258
taken to Bukhara by Tardi ‘Ali 237
takes grandson back to Bukhara 340
tells Aurangzib of
Anusha's defeat 336
fall of Bala Murghab 345, 346
troops seize ‘Abd al-Rahman 263
truce with Qasim Muhammad 270
Safi Sultan, Ashtarkhanid
appointed to Khwarazm 230
candidate to the throne 207, 207n
execution 230
sent to take Khwarazm 218n
Sufi Sultan, Kashghariyan Prince
tries to seize Badakhshan 48
suits of armour 469, 470, 517, 518
sukonnaya sotnya 498
Sulaiman I, ruler of Iran
accession 287
angers Subhan Quli 343
asked to help Daudov 311
cheating of Bukharan envoy 300
embassies from Subhan Quli 306,
330, 333
embassy from ‘Abd al-‘Aziz 300
embassy to ‘Abd al-‘Aziz 290
exempts Pazukhin from taxes 298
friendly towards Subhan Quli 348
prepares to fight Khwarazm 297
receives ‘Abd al-‘Aziz 327, 328n

657

Index
Sulaiman I (continued)

pays homage to Iskandar

17
put to death in 1582 41
put to flight 39
Tahmasp, ruler of Iran
agreement with Kisten Qara? 71
asks for help against khanate 18
assassination 27
burning of remains 64
causes difficulties for pilgrims 16
goodwill mission to khanate 17
refuses to extradite Bayazid 18
re-internment of ‘real’ remains 88-9
Taib Khwajah Juibari, khanate cleric
goes over to Mughals 239
visits India 259n
Taishev Baibiryi, Muscovite envoy
sent to khanate 60
Taj al-Din Juibari, khanate cleric
Mir Birkah worked for him 151
Tajarrud battle 184
Tamerlane
Abu I-Khair fights descendants 2
capital in Samarqand 1
gifts to his tomb 151, 342
model for Shaibani 3
tamga, M. tax 464n, 467, 467n, 468,
471, 479, 497n
tamgha, khanate tax 414, 414n, 445
tamozhennaya poshlina, M. tax
- see tamga
Tamozhennyi ustav of 1653 479-81
tanga, coin, value against
the écu 449n
the rouble 380n
the rupee 240, 265n
the shahi 440n
Tangri Birdi parwanchi, khanate official
arrests Sadiq Muhammad 339
Tarbiyyat Khan, Mughal envoy
back from khanate in 1634 184
ill-treated in Iran 289, 289n
~ sent to khanate in 1633 181
welcomes envoys to India 199, 281
Tardi ‘Ali, Bukharan envoy
first mission to Turkey 79
second mission 89

sends army to Khurasan 330
Sulaiman II, Ottoman ruler
writes to khanate in 1688 346
Sulaiman Khalifa, Iranian amir
appointed to Mashhad 66
asks Rustam Mirza to Khurasan 66
death 67, 67n
Sulaiman Sultan, Janibegid
ambitious to rule? 19, 20n
appointed to Dabusi 20
defends Dabusi 22
older than Iskandar 18, 19n
Sulaiman the Magnificent, Ottoman ruler
refuses to help against khanate 18
soldiers to Nauriz Ahmad 11, 42n
Sulaiman yasawal, khanate official
deserts post 104
welcomes Wali M. to Marw 100
Sultan Ahmad, Kashghariyan ruler
dies at Andijan 189, 190n
Sultan Husain, ruler of Iran
receives Bukharan envoy 353
sends army against Maimana 359
sultan ma’nawi 100, 107
Sultan Sa ‘id, Kichkinchid
attacks
Bukhara in 1567-8 21
Dabusi in 1569 22
Karmina in 1570 23
back in Samarqand in 1569 22
besieges Bukhara in 1559? 15
death 24
exiled 12n, 22
fights ‘Abdallah in Miyankal 22
gifts from Iran 17
loses Samarqand to khan 10
retakes Samarqand in 1556 12
sultan suri 100
Sungar Qalmaq 142n, 203, 336
Suyunch Bi, Balkh amir
determined against Bagi Yaz 228
execution of Kafsh Qalmaq 259
Suyinch Muhammad, Khwarazmian
helps ‘Abdallah's army 24
Suyiinch Sultan, Abilkhairid 105
sval'naya, sval'noe 464, 465
Sweden, Swedish 13n, 140, 140n,
484, 526
Tahir baqawil, Bukharan amir
negotiates with Nadir M. 251
sent to Iran 229, 229n
takes Khwarazm for Nadir M. 217
Tahir Sultan, Suyiinchid
apologises for Samarqand attack 38
friendly towards ‘Abdallab 34, 35
offers allegiance 34

Tardi “Ali Qataghan, Balkh amir

abuses position as diwanbegi 233
appointed to Kahmard 213
fights Mughals at Shiburghan 237
flees Kahmard in 1644 234
loyal to Nadir Muhammad 230
put to death 260
raids Qandahar area 229

sent
against Alman 232
to defend Hisar 230

658

Index
Tardi ‘Ali Qataghan (continued)
sent
to retake Hisar 232
to retake Kahmard 231
to seize Subhan Quli 260
takes Subhan Quli to Bukhara 237

Tariki, Afghan tribe 54, 62
Tashkent

Baqi M. defeated nearby? 120,
120n
besieged by Qazaqs in 1611 131
demanded by Jahangir Qazaq 219
given to Qazaqs in 1598 103
governors
“Abdallah Sultan in 1628 174
Bik Ughli in 1636 189
Darwish Sultan in 1578 29
Dustam Sultan in 1582 42

Ishim Sultan in 1627 172
Ishim Sultan's son in 1612 136
Iskandar, son of Imam Q. 178
Jahangir Sultan in 1598 103
Payanda M. in 1606 125
Pir M. Qazaq in 1628 74, 178
Shah Sa‘id in 1611 131
Tursin Muhammad in 1612 137
Tursin M.'s son in 1611 131

Uzbeg Sultan in 1584-5 49
pays tribute to Galdan in 1681 337
rebellion of 1621-2 154
regained by Imam Quli in 1633 182
seized by
Abuli Sultan 125, 174
Baba Sultan 32

Ishim Sultan 172
Qazags and Torgouts 182
Tawakkul 102
threatened by Abiuli in 1630 178
Yalangtish sent there in 1641 205
taslim 57,171
Tatars 460, 475, 476, 478n, 483, 489,
490, 493, 500, 504, 505, 518, 519,
520, 534, 535, 538, 539
Tauka Khan, son of Jahangir Qazaq
attacks khanate in 1653? 268
embassy to Subhan Quli 340

friendly towards Subhan Quli 354
loses towns to Qalmaq 336
mission from Siberia 291
rebels in 1688? 342
sends Muscovite heads to khanate
349
show of strength near Tashkent 354
son captive in Tibet 337
unfriendly to Muscovites 354
urged to attack khanate in 1654?
270

visited by Mulla Farrukh 300
Tavernier, French traveller 382, 444,

447, and pass.
Tawakkul, son of Shighai Qazaq
appointed to Bukharan vanguard 40
attacks khanate 49, 94, 95, 102
death 103
defeats
“Abdallah's brother in 1584 49
Bukharan army in 1597 94
determined on revenge 45
dutiful towards ‘Abdallah 86
finds food for Bukharan army 40
given Afarinkent 41
helps fight Baba Sultan 39-42
helps Kashghariyan Prince 80, 82
kills Suyunchid Princes in 1583 44
mentioned in letter to Turkey 51
not allowed to lead attack 40
pursues and kills Baba Sultan 41
submits to ‘Abd al-Mu’ min 96
ttaught military arts 38
racks down Tahir Sultan 41
wants help against “Abdallah 80, 86
warns against ‘Abdallah 78
taxes

Bukharans suspected of evasion
476-7, 488-9, 491, 534
fines demanded by tsars 464, 518,
519, 526, 541
in China 454
in India 445, 446, 447, 449
in khanate
exemptions 420, 422
types 4, 413, 414-5
in Muscovy 60, 464-8, 464-8nn,
471, 472, 475-6, 477, 479,
480, 485-7, 489, 496, 497
in Siberia 504, 505, 507, 509, 510,
S12. 513 pols oles 22-95
526, 527, 528-9, 530, 531,
535, 536, 539-40, 539n, 541
payable in gold and silver 408, 542
tea 514, 521
cost 383, 458, 458n
disposed of by Seitkul Ablin 458
properties 383
temzuy 386, 459
tents 389, 451
teplovoe, M. tax 536n
teziki 463 and pass.
the one-third rule 419-20, 422-3, 423n,
425, 425n
Tikhanov, Muscovite envoy
report on mission 141-2
route followed 123
sent to Iran 141

Index

tim 6,418
Time of Troubles in Muscovy
affects posadskie lyudi 497, 506
Astrakhan offered to Shah 141
difficulties of Central Asians 470
False Dmitrif 140, 141
shortage of bullion 474

move to Qara Qum

178

oath of vassalage 316-7, 483, 483n
promise to protect Noghays 182
refuse to fight khanate 220
- see also Ayuka, Daichin, Ho
Urluk, Louzan, Monchak
torgovaya rublevaya poshlina
- see rublevaya poshlina

Timur Sultan, Khwarazmian Prince
besieged in Khiva 27

trade hostels 454
- see also gostinyi dvor
trading through agents 476, 530, 538
forbidden by tsars 487, 515, 527
possible in Siberia 523
transit passes 515, 523, 524, 540-1,
541n
- see also proezzhaya gramota
transit taxes/dues
in India 445, 446
in Muscovy 471, 477, 479, 486,
487, 507, 518, 540
- see also proezzhaya poshlina
‘. Troshin, Muscovite envoy
sent to Qazaqs 354
Tsevan Arabtan, Sungar 354
Tughma Bi Yabu, Bukharan amir
executed 352, 359n

embassies to ‘Abdallah 37, 48
put to death? 75
retires to Wazir 74
Tini Bik, Kashghariyan envoy
embassy to the khanate 281
tithe 528, 531, 537
tobacco 457, 459
cost 381, 509, 512, 531
dangerous 382
taken to Iran 441
- see also ball-tobacco
tobacco in Muscovy
concessions re import in 1697 495
imports by English? 477
imports prohibited 478, 489
importers to be tortured 405
sale forbidden 476, 478, 483
smuggling 489
tobacco in Siberia
exchanged for furs 440
farmed out to
Lord Carmarthen 529-30
Martyn Bogdanov 525, 528
Matvei Poppe 524
penalties 471, 478-9, 495, 509,
SS H52 2552659825955
purchase ban lifted 529
sale forbidden 508, 509, 509n,
511, 526, 530-1
sale to Treasury permitted 531
smuggled in 536
sold by Tsar's agents 511-2, 511n,
525
tax 526, 529
to be burnt 515
to be confiscated 522, 532
Toburchuk, Qaraqalpak 355
toll, see tax
Tolstoy M., Verkhotu're voevoda 519
Torgouts, Qalmaq tribe 142n
attack khanate 182, 203?
attack Khiva 268, 268n
attack travellers to Muscovy 325
crush Ablai 296, 296n
defeated by Muscovites in 1633 182
embassy to Subhan Quli 340
escort Pazukhin to Bukhara 293
location of encampments 411

flees to Ura Tipa 352
rebels 350, 359?
sent against rebels 349
Turkey 94, 483, 491, 493, 525
Turkmen
asked to help Hajjim Khan
104n

104,

attack Khokhlov's party 149-50
embassy to Iran 256
hostile towards Bukhara 243
ill-treat Daudov 315-6
well disposed towards Nadir M.
238, 242
Turstun Muhammad, Ashtarkhanid
death in 1597 95, 95n
is Muhammad Ibrahim his son? 105
Tursun Muhammad, Qazaq Prince

appointed to Tashkent in 1612 137
attacks Abuli in 1625 169
besieges Tashkent 131

camp sacked by Ishim Sultan 139
defeats Nadir diwanbegi 166
defended by Nadir Muhammad 139
embassy to Qalmaq in 1624 168
fails to support Imam Quli 136
falls out with Imam Quli 150

killed by Ishim Sultan 172
married to Imam Quli's aunt

151

model vassal 142

on good terms with Ishim 171
rebels in 1623 166

660

Index
Turstun Muhammad (continued)
removed from Tashkent 136

Uzbeg Khwajah, khanate envoy

son appointed to Tashkent 131
son attacks Tashkent 188
son governs Kashghar 151
son in prison in Balkh 192
sons visit Balkh 192, 192n
Tushetu Khan 429
tyaglo, M. tax 484, 496, 498, 535, 537
“Ubaidallah I, ruler of khanate
feud with Din Muhammad 14
forced to abandon siege of Herat 34
tules from Bukhara 9
son dies in 1549 8
‘Ubaidallah II, ruler of khanate
accession 361
death 362
reasons for accession 361-2
‘Ubaidallah b.Mahmud, Janibegid
confirmed in Jaghaniyan 112
executed 123
proclaimed in Balkh 111
rebels against Wali Muhammad 123
supports Muhammad Ibrahim 111
ukaznyi tovar, ukaznye tovary 463,
513
Ukraine 490
Ulozhenie of 1649 478-9
‘Ummat Khan, Iranian amir
named to Mashhad 59
plot against him 63

first mission to India 164, 164n,
170
keen to fight rebels in 1645 228
offers support to Nadir M. 207
second mission 199-200, 201n
sees illuminations in India 200
son's mission to India 259
takes over Khwarazm 218
third mission? 306
_ welcomed by Tarbiyyat Khan 199
Uzbeg Sultan, Janibegid
appointed to
Bukhara in 1550 8
Hisar in 1574 25
Shahr-i sabz and Qarshi in 1569
22
Tashkent in 1585 49
death in 1598 96
defects to Din M. of Balkh 23
defends Tashkent against rebels 56
does not claim the throne 45, 46
fights ‘Abd al-Mu’min 96
fights at Zamin 29
helps “Abdallah fight Jawanmard 21
hostile to ‘Abdallah 25
Khurasan campaign 23
leads Kashghariyan campaign 81
mediates with Badakhshan 27
takes Shiburghan for ‘Abdallah 23
uzol'tsovoe, uzlovaya, M. tax 468,
468n

Ura Tipa

Uz Timir Qataghan, Balkh amir

senior to Ishim 139, 139n

rebels against Subhan Quil 350
submits to khan 352
Van Klenk, Dutch commercial envoy
431, 448 and pass.
Vasilii Shuisky, ruler of Muscovy 464,
465, 466, 506, 507
Vatagin Mikhailo, Muscovite trader
visits Bukhara 506
velikie goods in Muscovy 470
venechnoe, M. tax 536n
Venetian envoys to Istanbul 51, 61
Vienna 492
Virginian 526

‘Abdallah marches there 32
Kuchkunchid defeat 34

rebels seek refuge 352
Uraz Bi, Balkh amir
abandons siege of Hisar 232
ataliq to ‘Abd al-Aziz 186
campaign to Maruchaq 177
killed 233n
sent to defend Hisar 230
takes Bala Murghab 162

Uraz Kildi, Balkh amir
sent to Aurangzib 251, 251n
Urmamet, Noghay chief 68
Urus, Noghay chief
resents sale of Noghays 48n
sells Russians in Bukhara 362
Urus Sultan, Qaazaq Prince?
rebels in Pskent 342
Ushah Bahadur, Bukharan envoy
mission to Turkey in 1594 79
Uthman II, Ottoman ruler
accession 146
murder 141
overtures to Iran 162

Vladislav, Polish king 183
voevoda, voevody

bully foreigners 462
bully Muscovites 498
- see also chapters 14 and 15 pass.

Voguls 506
Volkonskii, Astrakhan voevoda 494
vyboika 366-7, 436, 437, 484
vydel'nyi khleb, vydel’nyi pyatyi snop,
M. tax 497, 512, 529, 532, 535,
oh

661

Index
Wafadar Khan, see Zabardast
Wali Muhammad, ruler of khanate
accepts Iranian troops 130-1, 131n
accession 124
appointed to Badakhshan 118
appointed to Balkh 112
appointments to nephews 125
back in Bukhara 131

conflict with nephews

127-8

death 133

defeats Abuli Sultan in 1606-7 125
defeats Kildi M. in-1600 111
embassy to Noghays 134
fights Qazags 123, 125, 127
flees to Iran 113
kills plotters 129
leaves Iran 130
letters to Shah 128, 132
marches to Samarqand 123, 132-3
marches to Balkh 111, 126, 127-8
offers to pardon Imam Quli 127
plotted against 124, 129
punishes nephews' supporters 132
retakes Bukhara 114
sends
Imam Quli to Badakhshan 124
raiders to Khurasan 126
summoned by brother 122
takes Marw for brother in 1598 100
tries to improve agriculture 125
tyrannical ways 125, 128
walrus tusks 387, 456, 500, 540
Wagas Hajji, Bukharan envoy
goes to live in India in 1636 190
hostile to khanate 190, 193, 195
mission to India in 1632 180-1
warehouses 461, 477, 479, 480
warehouse fees in Muscovy and Siberia
489, 497, 507, 522, 534, 536, 538
- see also ambarnoe
warrior women of the khanate 279
weighable goods 465, 466, 466n, 471,
479, 481, 486, 487
wine in Muscovy and Siberia 60
export forbidden 495
penalty for illicit trade 533
provision to traders cancelled 475
sale restricted 469, 475
to be confiscated 522
trade allowed 484
- see also ambassador's allowance
woollens 373, 442, 452, 456, 501
Yadgar Chulaq, Balkh envoy
arrives in India 259-60
back with Nadir M.'s son 261
Yadgar, son of ‘Ibadallah
dead or forgotten in 1598? 99n

provision made for him 50
Yadgar Sultan Shamlu, Iranian envoy
sent to India 68
Yaka Taz Khan, Mughal envoy
sent to Balkh in 1670 299
son of Manstr Hajji? 299n
dismissed in 1675 323, 324
yakhont 459
Yakuts 518
Yalangtush Bi, Balkh amir
advice to Nadir M. 207, 246
approached by Gribov 216
ataliq to Shah Sa‘id Qazaq 131
attacks Khurasan 142-3, 146, 180,
181, 194

besieges Tashkent in 1636 188
brings Imam Quli to Samarqand 132
builds fort of Chutur in 1623 166
captures Bamian in 1628 174
defects to Imam Quliin 1610-1 129
encourages Afghan rebel 169
envoy to Shah Jahan 192
fights
Abuli 174
Andijan rebels 139, 189
Ishim Sultan 136
Mughals 166-7, 169, 174, 197,
246, 249
Turstn Sultan 154
first in realm 213n
harasses retreating Mughals 253
helps Jahangir against Batur 220
loses Kahmard to Subhan Quli 213
marches to Barbar in 1640 200

marches to Ubeh in 1621 158
negotiates with Baqi Yaz 228
prepares to attack
Khurasan in 1641 205
the Qalmaq in 1640 201-2
recalled from the Helmand 198
refuses Mughal bribes 246
sent
against Qazaqs 128n, 174
against Mughals in 1639 197
to avenge Imam Quli's son 188
to deal with Baqi Yaz 226
to defend Jijektu in 1635 185
sent to help Jahangir Qazaq 220
sent to negotiate with Aurangzib
249
stronghold attacked 161
supports ‘Abd al-‘Aziz 227-30
trades with India 442
unhelpful to Gribov 218
Yalangtish Bi's family
Fulad Sarai attacks Iran 266
nephews captured 177, 181

Index
Yalangtush Bi's family (continued)

defeats Afghan rebel 169
named to Kabul 167
zakat, khanate tax 414, 414n, 415n,
445, 446
Zamindawar
annexed by Mughals in 1595 84
attacked by Iran 121
lost to Muzzaffar Husain 66
retaken by Rustam Muhammad 76
seized by Iranin 1622 160
taken by Din M. in 1593 77
zamytnaya, see mytnaya
zapovednye tovary in Muscovy 487,
488, 499
available to rulers' agents 60
definition 60, 90, 463
German slaves included? 469, 470
gold and silver added in 1625 473
grain added in 1678 490
honey added? 469
in 1589 469
in 1596 470
in 1625 4731
in 1628 474-5
in 1672 489
in 1673 490
in 1687 493
in 1697 495
madder to be added to list 479
no exemption for ambassadors 495
rhubarb added 482-3, 483n
silver included in 1589? 469
slaves added in 1649 478
tobacco added 476, 478-9
wax added c.1588 469
young Tatars and live sables 490
zapovednye tovary in Siberia
concessions 516, 521
furs 504, 506, 508, 515, 516, 517,
520, 522, 524, 526, 527, 528,
530531532, 534
hunting-birds 504, 508
in 1594 504
in 1596 504
in 1599-1600 506
in 1618-20 508-9
in 1664 515-6
in 1675 517
in 1692 522
in 1693 522-4
in 1698 442
in 1697 526-7
in 1698 530-1
in 1699 532-3
in 1700 534
rhubarb 513, 514, 524, 526, 531,
SBy

nephew killed at Chutur 166
son emigrates to India 200
yam 497
yamshchiki 304, 537
Yanysh Yanaev, Muscovite envoy
sent to Urganj 51
Ya‘qub Tupit, Bukharan amir
sent to govern Khwarazm 232
Yar Muhammad Bi Ming, Balkh official
ataliq to Salih Khwajah 356n
deals with Qipchag rebellion 359
persecuted by Sadiq M. 330
threatened by Balkh amirs 350
Yar Muhammad Bi (Mirza), Balkh amir

flees to Iran in 1600-1 112
plans pretenders’ campaign 123-4
put to death 126
Yar Muhammad Khan, ruler of khanate
appointed to Miyankal 103
first accession 100
flees from Pul-i Salar 102
forced to abdicate 112
married to Iskandar's daughter 100
refuses third tenure of office 120
second accession 107
Yar Muhammad Sultan, Abulkhairid
given Bukhara 9
killed 10
named to Bukhara 8
Yaryzhkin Petr, Muscovite envoy
performs the kow tow in China 269
yasak 504, 515, 526, 527, 531, 534,
535
yavchaya, yavka, yavlennaya, yavlennoe, yavochnaya, M. tax 464,
464n, 468, 497, 536, 539, 540
Yeilaq qush begi, Bukharan amir
arrests Sadiq Muhammad 339
causes 1694 rebellion 349
leads army against Anusha 332
yuft 374-5
Yulbars, Kashghariyan Prince

envoy to Bukhara 281
Yushan/Seit, ruler of Khwarazm
accession

214, 214n

bullies Gribov 215
gets slaves from Muscovy 226
on the conquest of Khwarazm 217
sent gerfalcons 216
taken to Bukhara in 1643 218
Yusuf Khwaja Haidari, Bukharan envoy
sent to India in 1654 269
Zabardast Khan, Mughal envoy
dismissed in 1688 342
mission to Bukhara in 1685 340-2
Zafar Khan, Mughal amir

663

Index
zarbaft 372-3, 372n, 451, 458
Zarutskii Ivan, Cossack rebel
seizes Astrakhan 141
sends Khokhlov to Iran 148
Zasekin A., Muscovite envoy
sent to Iran 110
zatvornaya lavka 461
zenden' 364, 364n, 365n, 458, 477,
484, 500, 507
:

distributed as gifts 431
made in Khwarazm 438
trade in 434, 436, 437

zolotnik, zolotniki, measure of weight
455, 542
Zubov A., Astrakhan voevoda 473
Zvenigorodskii Andrei, Muscovite
sent to Iran 79, 82, 83

664

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