Khanate of Bukhara

The refugees from Astrakhan

Drafted from Howorth, History of the Mongols from the 9th to the 19th Century, Part II: The So-Called Tartars of Russia and Central Asia, Division II (1880)formation

A few years after Ivan IV took Astrakhan, an elderly prince of its royal house left the Volga for Transoxiana and put himself under the protection of the Uzbek khan at Bukhara. Thirty years after that his grandson was on the Bukharan throne.

The inheritance

Yar Muhammad — called Qari, the grey, on account of his age — descended from Kuchuk Muhammad of the Golden Horde through a younger son, which made him a cousin of the khans the Russians had just dispossessed. He arrived in Bukhara around 1567, and Iskandar Khan of the Shaybanid line gave his daughter Zuhra Khanum to Yar Muhammad's son Jan Sultan.

That marriage is the whole legal basis of what followed. When the Shaybanid line of Abu'l-Khayr failed after Abdullah Khan II, the Uzbeks needed a Chinggisid and had one to hand — a family with an impeccable Jochid descent, no local power base and a mother who was Abdullah's own sister.

The road to the throne

It was not a peaceful transfer. Jan's son Din Muhammad was set up at Herat by his own grandson's manoeuvring, held only Herat and its district, and was a tool in other men's hands; he and his father probably died in or after the battle of Pul-i Salar, where the Persians broke the Uzbeks badly. Din Muhammad himself fell into the hands of the Qara Turkmen and was put to death.

His wife escaped by the courage of a servant called Khaki Yasaul, who put her and her two small sons into bags on either side of his saddle and rode. A bullet struck one of the boys — Nadir Muhammad — in the foot and lamed him for life.

The two surviving brothers, Baqi Muhammad and Wali Muhammad, got away into Transoxiana, and Baqi Muhammad took the throne. Howorth's verdict is flat: he was in reality the first khan of Bukhara of the new dynasty.

What the dynasty was

The Janids, or Ashtarkhanids — the name means the Astrakhanis, and that is exactly what they were.

The change of ruling house was less of a break than it looks. The new line held its title through marriage into the old one, governed the same Uzbek tribal confederation, kept the same officers, and faced the same two problems: Persia across the Oxus, and the tribal amirs at home.

What was genuinely new was that the axis of the Uzbek world had swung. The Shaybanids had come south out of the Kipchak steppe as conquerors within living memory of Muhammad Shaybani. The Janids came as exiles from a khanate that a European empire had already annexed. Between 1552 and 1599 the Jochid world lost Kazan, Astrakhan and the lower Volga; what was left of its royal families collected in Transoxiana.

Bukhara for the next three centuries was where that world ended up.

The city of colleges

Drafted from Vámbéry, Travels in Central Asia (1864)expansion

Ármin Vámbéry crossed the Turkmen desert in 1863 dressed as a Sunni dervish coming back from Mecca, because that was the only way a European could see Bukhara and survive it. What he found was a city organised around two things: learning, and watching people.

The medreses

Bukhara was the religious authority of Central Asia — the place a scholar from Kazan or Kashgar or Kabul came to be trained, and the place that certified what Islam meant for a quarter of a continent.

Vámbéry counted its colleges, described their endowments, and then delivered a judgement that a man in his position was in some danger for holding: that they had been founded as seminaries not of learning but of fanaticism. He is a nineteenth-century European writing for London and his contempt is easy to discount, but he had spent months with the students, in their language, and the observation he grounds it on is specific — that the questions the ulema of these cities wanted answered concerned the correct method of washing the hands, feet, face and back of the head, and how a man should sit, walk, lie and sleep.

One of the colleges, he notes drily, was founded by the Empress Catherine.

The police

The system of police in Bokhara is more severe than in any other city of known parts of Asia.

By day the reis walked the bazaars and public places himself, with his dependants and his spies out around him. About two hours after sunset nobody dared show himself in the streets: a neighbour could not visit a neighbour, and a sick man ran the risk of dying for want of a doctor. The emir had announced that the night watchmen might arrest him if they met him abroad during the forbidden hours.

Who lived there

Two and a half million people, by Vámbéry's estimate, with frontiers that could not be exactly drawn: Kokand and the Badakhshan mountains east, the Oxus and the districts beyond it south, the great desert west and north.

The composition is the most revealing part of his survey. Uzbeks, the ruling race, who had lived so closely with the Tajiks that they had lost much of their distinctness. Tajiks — the old Persian population of the towns. Kirghiz. Sixty thousand Arabs, descendants of the armies of the conquest, of whom he found very few who could still speak Arabic. Forty thousand Merv Persians, deported wholesale to Bukhara when the emir took that city around 1810. Hindus. Jews, confined to their own quarter.

And Persians — partly slaves, partly men who had bought their own freedom and stayed, because living was cheap and the profits better than at home. Vámbéry's note on them is the sharpest institutional observation in the book: a Persian in Bukhara commonly rose from slave to the highest offices in the state. Hardly a governor in the provinces did not employ in some post a Persian who had been his own slave and stayed loyal. They swarmed round the emir himself, the first dignitaries of the khanate belonged to that nation, and so did the commanders of the army.

A Sunni state whose chief officers were Shia captives from the country it raided. Vámbéry points out the consequence: if Persia ever invaded, the emir would bitterly rue it, because his generals were Persians.

Amir instead of khan

Drafted from Howorth, History of the Mongols from the 9th to the 19th Century, Part II: The So-Called Tartars of Russia and Central Asia, Division II (1880)peak

The Janids lost the state in 1740 without losing the throne, and the men who took it from them waited forty-five years to say so.

Nader Shah

The Persian conqueror crossed the Oxus in 1740 and reduced Bukhara to submission, and the khanate never recovered its independence of action under that dynasty. The Janids stayed on the throne. Everything that made a throne worth having went to the officers who had been running the state for them — the Manghit ataliqs, chiefs of one of the Uzbek tribes, who had held the effective administration for a generation.

It is the oldest arrangement in the Turco-Mongol world: a family that cannot legitimately hold the title governs in the name of one that can. Edigü did it to the Golden Horde for twenty years. Timur did it to the western Chagatai khans. The Manghits did it to the Janids for the better part of half a century.

Shah Murad

In 1785 Shah Murad ended it, set the last Janid aside and took the sovereignty himself.

And then solved, in one word, the problem that had defeated everyone else who tried this. He did not call himself khan. Khan required descent from Chinggis and he had none; so he called himself amir — commander — which required only that he command, and shifted the whole basis of the state's legitimacy from genealogy to religion.

He was well placed to do it. Shah Murad is remembered as an ascetic who wore coarse clothes, refused the revenues of his office, and lived on what he earned copying manuscripts. In the most orthodox city in Central Asia that was worth more than a pedigree.

The Manghits ruled from 1785 to 1920, longer than any dynasty in the region's modern history, and every one of them was amir and not khan.

What the title cost

It also fixed what the state could be.

An emir of Bukhara held his position as the protector of the faith and the patron of its colleges, which meant the ulema had a permanent veto they did not have elsewhere, and which meant that piety and severity were the same currency. This is the context for the police system Vámbéry described, and for the reputation the city had among its own neighbours.

A khan can be arbitrary and remain a khan. An amir whose whole warrant is religious zeal has to keep proving it.

Nasrullah

Drafted from Vámbéry, Travels in Central Asia (1864)peak

Vámbéry, who arrived three years after his death, heard him described as one of the greatest tyrants the world had been freed of. He also conquered Kokand, which no emir of Bukhara had managed, and held it for three months.

The quarrel

The emirate and the khanate of Kokand had been fighting over the Syr Darya towns — Ura-Tepe, Khojend — for a generation, and the war ran on a loop that Vámbéry records with some relish.

Nasrullah marched, in the greatest haste and still greater anger. Muhammad Ali of Kokand retreated, taking much of the population of Ura-Tepe with him because they feared the emir more. This time escape was impossible: Nasrullah followed him step by step until he could go no further, beat him at Khojend and took the city, chased him to his own capital and forced a peace at Kohna Badam by which Kokand ceded Khojend and much else.

Then he overreached. To insult the beaten khan further he appointed as governor of the ceded province the khan's own brother and rival, who had fled to Bukhara. The two brothers' mother reconciled them, and before the emir had heard anything about it Khojend and the other towns had rejoined Kokand and he had two enemies instead of one.

1842

His fury, Vámbéry writes, knew no bounds. He added ten thousand Tekke and Salor Turkmen to the thirty thousand horse and thousand sarbaz of his standing army, marched so fast that Muhammad Ali had to fly from his own capital, caught him near Marghilan, and ten days later executed him in Kokand with his brother and his two sons. Most of his supporters followed them to the executioners and their property was confiscated.

To justify it, Nasrullah put out that Muhammad Ali had married his own mother and had accordingly been punished by death.

He went home loaded with booty, leaving a Merv-born governor and two thousand men in the city.

Three months

Three months later the Kipchaks, who had stayed neutral throughout, grew tired of the Bukharans, took the city, made the garrison prisoner, and put Muhammad Ali's son on the throne.

Then they used the prisoners. To avoid being surprised again they decided to wall off the quarter containing the khan's residence, and built it with the forced labour of the emir's captured garrison.

Nasrullah sent fifteen thousand men back under a Kokandi pretender he had kept at his court. On the march the pretender reconciled with his countrymen; the gates were opened to him; and his first act was to turn on the Bukharans who had escorted him there and put them to flight.

Four times overreached, the emir sent a fifth army. It got as far as Ura-Tepe and stopped, because news came that Nasrullah had fallen ill at Samarkand and gone home to Bukhara, where he shortly died.

What the story shows

Bukhara at its most powerful could beat Kokand's army, take its capital, kill its dynasty and install a governor — and could not hold the place for a season.

An emirate of two and a half million people, with the richest irrigated land between Persia and China and the religious authority of a continent, could not project force two hundred miles up the Syr Darya against a smaller and poorer neighbour. That is the measure of what the three khanates were by the 1840s, and of what happened when a power arrived that could.

The black well

Drafted from Howorth, History of the Mongols from the 9th to the 19th Century, Part II: The So-Called Tartars of Russia and Central Asia, Division II (1880)aside?What aside means

Between 1838 and 1842 two British officers were held in Bukhara and killed there, and the record of it is the most detailed portrait there is of how Nasrullah's court actually worked.

Stoddart

Colonel Charles Stoddart was sent to Bukhara as an envoy, and gave immediate offence — over how he arrived, how he sat, and what he would not say. He was put in confinement. One day the vizier came into his room and he was taken out to the Rigistan, the great square, and told to do what everybody but the amir did there; he objected. He would not make the supplication of a slave, and he refused to be moved on the point.

Then his papers were seized and burnt, his effects and horses sold, and he was lowered by a rope into the Siah Chah — the black well — a dungeon pit twenty-one feet deep where the worst criminals were kept. He found two thieves and a murderer at the bottom of it. He stayed there two months, covered with vermin and surrounded by reptiles, his food let down on a rope, smoking most of the time.

Then he was taken out and offered his life if he would become a Muslim. Worn down by what he had endured, he consented, repeated the confession of faith, and was circumcised in the public square in front of an enormous crowd drawn by the novelty of it.

Russian officials worked for his release and got it, whereupon his nerve came back and he renounced the conversion he had made under force. The amir was so struck by this that he took off his own fur cloak, gave it to him, and had him led in triumph through the streets.

The offers

What follows is stranger than the cruelty.

Nasrullah began courting him. He hoped, one account says, to attach him as Ranjit Singh had attached other Englishmen. Those Feringhis, the amir said, so powerful and clever in the arts and diplomacy, so talented in organising an army, bring everywhere success in their train. He sent Stoddart tobacco and presents and asked him in return to replace the quicksilver on his mirrors, to make him a thermometer, and to make candles that would burn without smoke.

He offered to send him with an embassy to St Petersburg, from which he could simply have gone home. Stoddart refused, on the ground that he had not received orders from his own government to withdraw from Bukhara — a devotion that was not understood and only deepened the suspicion that he was a spy. The amir ordered him poisoned; he survived by exciting the greed of a courtier who hoped for a ransom.

The letters he got out in this period, sewn into the hems of the robes of Khorasanis, Kurds, Persians and Jews, breathe the spirit of Cromwell's Puritans; the soldier and the diplomat in them stand far below the religious conviction that governed him.

The answer to Khiva

The sultan of Turkey, the tsar and the khan of Khiva all asked for his release. To the first two Nasrullah returned ambiguous answers. To Khiva he wrote something that explains the entire relationship of the three khanates to the two empires circling them:

You have an Englishman and so have I. Why do you wish to take mine?

The Englishman at Khiva was Captain Arthur Conolly, who had been sent to Kokand to explore it and to check the Russian advance. Since Bukhara regarded Kokand as in some sense dependent on it, and since Conolly's visit coincided with the Kokandi khan's defiance, Nasrullah decided Conolly was the cause of it. A letter came from Stoddart inviting him to Bukhara; his Khivan and Kokandi friends told him not to go; he applied for a safe-conduct and got one at once, because the amir wanted him.

He went to persuade Nasrullah to join the other Uzbek princes in a league against Russia. Both men were executed in 1842.

What it was really about

Not two officers. Two empires, and three khanates trying to work out what to do about them.

Nasrullah's sentence is not a joke. He had understood exactly what a European was worth on that market — a bargaining counter, a source of thermometers and army drill, a hostage, a proof of standing — and he was not going to hand his over to a rival khan who already had one of his own.

Within thirty years one of the two empires had taken all three khanates, and the khans who had bargained over Englishmen were signing whatever was put in front of them.

Samarkand

Drafted from Schuyler, Turkistan: Notes of a Journey in Russian Turkistan, Khokand, Bukhara, and Kuldja (1876)end

The emirate lost its independence over five years and never lost a dynasty, a capital or a khan. That is what makes it the clearest case of how the Russian conquest of Central Asia actually worked.

The mechanism

Russia came down the Syr Darya from the north through the 1850s and 1860s, taking the Kokandi forts one at a time — Ak Masjid in 1853, Tashkent in 1865 — and then turned on Bukhara. In 1868 a Russian force took Samarkand and the upper Zarafshan.

The emir kept his throne. He kept his army, his courts, his officials, his taxes, his title and his capital. What he signed away was his foreign policy, his tariff — Russian goods entering at two and a half per cent — and the right to make war.

And the water. Samarkand sits on the upper Zarafshan, which is the river the whole Bukharan oasis lives on. Whoever holds the headwaters holds the harvest of every field downstream, and the fact did not need to be written into any treaty.

What Schuyler found

Eugene Schuyler, the American consul at St Petersburg, travelled through in 1873 and was received at the emir's court. He is a useful witness because he had no stake in Russian self-congratulation and was rude about the Khivan campaign in the same book.

What he describes is an emirate to all appearances exactly as it had been. The same bazaars, the same colleges, the same police, the same court ceremonial, the same emir — Muzaffar al-Din, whom Vámbéry had seen ten years earlier. Nothing visible had changed and nothing important was any longer being decided there.

Why it went this way

Because it was cheaper. A protectorate cost Russia one resident and no administration, produced the same cotton and the same trade access as annexation, and left the emir to collect the taxes and suppress the discontent himself.

The contrast with Kokand is the argument. Kokand's khan fled his own rebels in 1875 and the khanate was annexed outright the following year and renamed Ferghana. Bukhara's emir did what he was told, and his family sat in the citadel for another forty-seven years.

What ended

A state that had been the religious authority for a quarter of Asia, that trained the scholars of Kazan and Kashgar, that had taken Kokand and executed its royal family, and whose emirs held their throne on the strength of having defended the faith, became — in five years and without a siege of its own capital — the internal affairs department of a European empire.

Ten years separate the two eyewitnesses. Vámbéry had to cross the Turkmen desert disguised as a mendicant, because a European who was recognised in Bukhara became a slave or a corpse. Schuyler arrived as a consul, was received at court, and went home and published the road distances.