Ghaznavid Empire

Alptigin goes east

Drafted from Bosworth, The Ghaznavids: Their Empire in Afghanistan and Eastern Iran, 994-1040 (1963)formation

Alptigin was Turkish, bought as a boy, raised in the Samanid slave establishment at Bukhara, and promoted to commander of the guard and then governor of Khurasan. That was a career, and by the standards of the system it was the top of one.

In 961 the amir Abd al-Malik died and Alptigin backed a candidate who lost. The new regime at Bukhara was not going to leave him in Khurasan. So in 962 he took his personal troops east, out of the settled provinces, to Ghazna in the Afghan highlands, and made himself its lord.

Nothing about this was a declaration. He remained, in his own presentation, a Samanid officer holding a place; his successors at Ghazna continued to acknowledge Bukhara, strike coin in the Samanid amir's name, and accept appointments. The relationship on the ground was that the Samanids could not remove him and did not try.

This is the same move the Samanids themselves had made against the Tahirids and the Tahirids against the caliphate, performed one link further down the chain and by a man who was, legally, property. The system that produced him was designed to guarantee that he could never do it: a slave soldier has no tribe, no land and no lineage, and therefore no base to defect with. What it did not account for was that the troops were loyal to their commander rather than to the institution, and that a commander with troops does not need a base. He can go and take one.

Fourteen years later, Sebuktigin — Alptigin's own slave, and his son-in-law — took Ghazna the same way. The dynasty is dated from him.

What Sebuktigin took, and from whom

Drafted from al-Utbi, The Kitab-i-Yamini: Historical Memoirs of the Amir Sabaktagin and the Sultan Mahmud of Ghazna (1858)expansion

Al-Utbi worked for the Ghaznavids and wrote about them accordingly: the Indian kings are "the accursed", every Ghaznavid decision is generous, every victory fulfils a verse. Read past the varnish and his account of Sebuktigin's Indian wars is still the best one there is, partly because he records the arguments the Ghaznavids had among themselves and the terms they actually agreed to.

Sebuktigin had been taking hill forts along the eastern approaches for some years when Jayapala, king of the Punjab, worked out what was happening to his frontier. Al-Utbi lets him reason it through: his border was shrinking a piece at a time, his inherited kingdom would go to the winds if he did nothing, and the world would judge him harshly for letting it. So he called in his feudatories and allies and came up to the Muslim frontier with a great army, hoping the sight of it would settle the matter.

The two armies met on the border and fought each other to a standstill, and then the weather decided it. Al-Utbi reports a spring in that country which was clear and sweet as long as nothing unclean went into it, but which, if anything foul were thrown in, produced lightning, violent wind and bitter cold. Sebuktigin ordered wine-flasks thrown into it. Darkness came over the sky, the day went dim, and a freezing mist settled on the armies until, al-Utbi says, no one could endure it and they were close to death. Jayapala asked for terms.

The terms he offered were everything: submission at discretion, annual tribute, acknowledgement of Sebuktigin's authority over his states, and elephants. The old amir was inclined to accept and to distribute the proceeds among his commanders. His son Mahmud — al-Utbi, writing under him, calls him Sultan throughout even at this date — refused outright and said the thing could only be finished by storming the camp, that granting a truce to men in that condition would be unworthy of the glory of Islam, and quoted scripture at his father.

What changed Sebuktigin's mind was Jayapala's reply, which is the one speech in the book that is allowed to be dignified. You know, he said, how Indians behave in extremity: they do not fear death, and in a matter of honour they will lay themselves on the fire like roasting meat and on the dagger like sunlight. If you are refusing us terms because you want our wealth, our elephants, our women and our children, then when it comes to it we will put every one of them and everything we own, living and dead, into the fire, and then kill ourselves, and you will have dust and ashes. Sebuktigin thought they would do it, overruled his son, and settled for a ransom: a thousand purses of a thousand dinars each, five stables of elephants, some cities and fortresses, and the sons of Jayapala, his courtiers and his senior officers as hostages until the cessions were made.

Jayapala got a few marches from the frontier, decided he was safe, and broke the treaty, arresting the officers sent to take over the ceded forts in retaliation for his own people held at Ghazna. Sebuktigin refused to believe the first reports. When they were confirmed he went back and destroyed the country he had spared: plundered, burnt the buildings, took the children and the cattle, left Lamghan stripped bare, and put mosques where the temples had been.

Jayapala then wrote to every province in India for help, raised a hundred thousand horse, and marched on Ghazna. Sebuktigin went forward to meet him and rode into a thicket in disguise to count them, and saw an army like an ocean. His answer was a tactic rather than a charge: five hundred men were to attack and hold until they had nothing left, then five hundred more were to take their place, and so on in succession. It worked. The Indian line was worn down, one combined charge broke it, and the rest threw away their arms and went. The frontier districts were annexed, and al-Utbi says that from then on a thousand horse attended Sebuktigin's stirrup whenever he wanted them.

The last thing in this stretch of the book is the one that mattered most. The Samanid amir Nuh, with an army out of the Turkish provinces taking his inheritance away from him, sent to Ghazna asking for help. Sebuktigin went. The reward for going was Khurasan, and the governorship of it for his son.

Mahmud, and the uses of a caliph

Drafted from Bosworth, The Ghaznavids: Their Empire in Afghanistan and Eastern Iran, 994-1040 (1963)peak

When Bukhara fell to the Karakhanids in 999, Mahmud was governing Khurasan in Samanid name. He did not march north. He kept Khurasan, agreed the Oxus as a frontier with the men who had destroyed his overlords, and turned south.

Then he did something the Samanids had never bothered with. He applied to Baghdad, and the caliph al-Qadir sent him a diploma of investiture and the title yamin al-dawla. Mahmud was the first ruler in this region to be styled sultan in regular usage, and he had gone to considerable trouble to obtain a piece of paper from an institution that had no soldiers within a thousand miles.

The trouble was worth it because of what he intended to do. Seventeen campaigns into northern India, over three decades, presented as jihad and financed by the proceeds of the previous one, need a frame — and a caliphal investiture is the frame. The temple at Somnath in 1026 is the campaign everyone remembers, and it was remembered by design; the loot paid for Ghazna, and Ghazna paid for a court.

That court is why the Ghaznavids are more than a raiding operation. Firdawsi presented the Shahnama to Mahmud, badly rewarded and famously resentful about it. Al-Biruni, taken from Khwarazm when Mahmud annexed it, wrote the Kitab al-Hind — the most careful account of Indian science and religion produced by any medieval Muslim scholar — under a patron whose Indian policy was the one described above.

The administrative apparatus, the Persian chancery, the slave-soldier corps and the court model were all inherited from Bukhara essentially unaltered, and Mahmud made a public argument out of it. He did not merely run a copy of the Samanid state; he presented himself as the man who had rightfully carried it on.

Seventeen campaigns, and what was made of one of them

Drafted from Thapar, Somanatha: The Many Voices of a History (2004)peak

Mahmud campaigned into northern India roughly seventeen times over thirty years. The pattern was consistent and it was not conquest: an army went down from Ghazna in the campaigning season, took what a rich temple town or a defeated prince could be made to yield, and came back. Only the Punjab was annexed. The rest was a revenue operation with a religious frame — presented as jihad, financed by the previous year's proceeds, and paying for a court at Ghazna that was the most expensive in the eastern Islamic world.

The raid on the temple of Somnath in Gujarat in 1026 is the one everybody knows, and what it is remembered as has mattered more, for longer, than what a contemporary chronicle actually recorded.

What happened is not seriously in doubt in outline: a long march across the desert, a rich coastal temple taken and stripped, heavy killing, and the return to Ghazna with a quantity of gold. What Thapar's account establishes is how little the event's later fame corresponds to its contemporary footprint. The Sanskrit inscriptions of the region, the merchant and royal biographies, the local chronicles, the court epics — the sources produced by the people it happened to — say strikingly little about it. Somnath was rebuilt and endowed afterwards, including with the participation of Muslim traders resident on that coast, whose presence in the same ports continued through the whole period. Trade across the Arabian Sea did not stop.

The event acquired its stature in stages: in the Persian court literature that made Mahmud an idol-breaking hero for Ghaznavid and later audiences, in Turco-Persian romance, and then — decisively — in nineteenth-century British parliamentary rhetoric and colonial historiography, from which it entered modern political argument as the founding injury of a civilisational quarrel. Each of those layers had a use for it. None of them is the eleventh century.

It is worth being exact about what the raids did and did not accomplish, because they are the famous part and they are not the consequential one. Raiding is not conversion. Nothing Mahmud carried off from Somnath made a single Muslim. What did establish Islam in northern India was the garrison and the court his successors kept at Lahore for a century and a half after they had lost everything west of the Indus, and that is the subject of a later chapter.

Dandanqan

Drafted from Barthold, Turkestan Down to the Mongol Invasion (1928)contraction

The war Mas'ud lost in Khurasan was not lost in an afternoon. Barthold sets out the asymmetry and then declines to narrate the campaigns, on the grounds that they are all the same campaign: a Ghaznavid army much more numerous and much better armed than the Seljuks, and encumbered in advance by its own baggage, against light divisions of nomads for whom the steppe was "father and mother" and who could leave their baggage a hundred and twenty miles behind the fighting and not care.

The winter before was a fair sample. In January Mas'ud got as far as the pass of Shuniyan and a despatch reached him saying the Seljuks were moving from Sarakhs towards Guzgan, apparently meaning to reach Tirmidh, destroy the bridge and cut him off from his own territory. The pass in front of him was held by a Qarakhanid prince who knew the country and he did not. He turned round on 12 January and took a fortnight to reach Tirmidh, pursued the whole way and losing part of his baggage, his camels and his horses to a man whose reputation the retreat made.

In May 1040, at a fortress forty miles from Merv called Dandanqan, it ended. A throne was put up on the battlefield and Tughril Beg sat on it and was acclaimed amir of Khurasan, and letters went out announcing the victory to both khans of Turkestan and to every Turkish prince who might be interested. Fugitives from the Ghaznavid army were deliberately chased as far as the Oxus so that they would cross it and be seen in Transoxiana, where their arrival would confirm what the letters said.

Mas'ud's own reaction is the part that dates the collapse. He wrote to the Qarakhanid ruler expressing confidence that Arslan Khan would not refuse him help and might even join the campaign in person — Barthold notes that Bayhaqi drafted the letter — while privately concluding that he would lose not merely Balkh and its provinces but Ghazna itself. His vizier and his nobles told him there was no cause for that. He decided to withdraw to India anyway, sent the Qarakhanid prince diplomas for Balkh and Tukharistan in the hope of setting him against the Seljuks, and gave the nobles he was leaving behind at Ghazna formal permission to take service with the Seljuks when they arrived. He was deposed and killed in January 1041.

The despair turned out to be premature, which is the thing usually left out. Mas'ud's son Mawdud took the throne in April 1041 and held Balkh and Tirmidh; the Turkish ruler in Transoxiana submitted to him. The commander of Tirmidh, Amirak Bayhaqi, held that town against the Seljuks for fifteen years and only gave it up when there was no Ghaznavid hope left anywhere, and when the Seljuk offered him the vizierate for it he refused and went home.

So Khurasan was gone and the dynasty was not. What Dandanqan settled was which direction the Ghaznavids would face for the rest of their existence.

Pushed into the Punjab

Drafted from Bosworth, The Later Ghaznavids: Splendour and Decay. The Dynasty in Afghanistan and Northern India, 1040-1186 (1977)contraction

What is unusual about losing Khurasan is that the dynasty then lasted another century and a half. Deprived of the west, the Ghaznavids consolidated on what remained — eastern Afghanistan and the Punjab — and the centre of the state drifted steadily towards the Indian provinces that had originally been the raiding ground.

In 1151 Ala al-Din Husayn of Ghur, a vassal house from the mountains between Ghazna and Herat, sacked Ghazna itself and earned the epithet Jahansuz, the world-burner. The Ghaznavids retook the city, lost it again to Ghuzz Turkmen in 1163, and moved the capital permanently to Lahore.

The last Ghaznavid century is therefore an Indian one, and that is the durable result. Lahore became a Persianate capital: a chancery working in Persian, a court literature, an established Sunni institutional life in a region that had had none of these. Everything the Delhi Sultanate would later run on had a working model three hundred miles up the road, built by a dynasty that had arrived intending to raid.

The book about India

Drafted from Bosworth, The Ghaznavids: Their Empire in Afghanistan and Eastern Iran, 994-1040 (1963)aside?What aside means

When Mahmud annexed Khwarazm in 1017 he took its scholars back to Ghazna with everything else. One of them was al-Biruni, who spent the rest of his life in Ghaznavid service and produced, some time after 1030, a book about India.

Its title is a statement of method: Tahqiq ma li'l-Hind — an investigation of what is said about India, of the accounts acceptable to reason and those to be rejected. He learned Sanskrit in order to write it. He read the texts, talked to Brahmins, worked through the astronomy and the mathematics — which he was qualified to assess, being one of the best astronomers of the age — and set out Indian cosmology, philosophy, law, chronology, weights, festivals and caste, with the sources named and the disagreements between them recorded.

He is also explicit about the difficulty. He says the Hindus differ from Muslims in everything and that the differences are compounded by the recent wars, which have made his subjects wary of the people he arrived with; he says that translating between the two systems is hard because the vocabularies do not map; and he complains, at length, about the unreliability of what Muslims had previously written about India. He is not neutral — he thinks his own religion is true and says so — but he separates the question of what Indians believe from the question of whether it is correct, and reports the first without constantly answering the second.

That was produced at the court of the man whose armies had made those wars, funded by the proceeds. Somnath is the raid with the enormous afterlife; this is a book by a man in the same tents, in the same decades, doing the opposite thing, and it stayed almost unknown outside a narrow scholarly circle until a German edition and translation in the 1880s put it into general circulation.

The Ghaznavid court is generally remembered for two things: for Firdawsi, who presented the Shahnama to Mahmud, was badly rewarded, and said so at length; and for the plunder. It also produced this, which is one of the very few books written anywhere in the medieval world in which a man from a conquering culture sets out to describe the conquered one accurately, and says so.

The vassals finish it

Drafted from Bosworth, The Later Ghaznavids: Splendour and Decay. The Dynasty in Afghanistan and Northern India, 1040-1186 (1977)end

In 1186 Mu'izz al-Din Muhammad of Ghur took Lahore. Khusrau Malik surrendered under terms, was imprisoned, and was killed a few years later with his son. The line ended there.

The Ghurids had been Ghaznavid vassals. Their conversion to Islam, their entry into the wider political world, and their early standing all came through Ghazna. They were the client house in the mountains that Mahmud's successors used and did not think about much.

Set the two ends of the dynasty against each other. The Ghaznavids begin with a Samanid slave-general who took a frontier town and outlived his masters. They end with a vassal house from the highlands that took their capital and extinguished them. The dynasty is bracketed at both ends by the same mechanism, running once in its favour and once against it.

Then it runs a third time. Mu'izz al-Din's Indian conquests were consolidated by his own Turkish slave-generals, and when he died in 1206 one of them, Qutb al-Din Aibak, kept the Indian provinces and founded the Delhi Sultanate.

Alptigin to Aibak is two and a half centuries and three repetitions of a single move: the trusted instrument, having no legitimacy of its own, takes the territory instead.

He knew not the worth of Firdawsi

Drafted from Browne, A Literary History of Persia, Volume II: From Firdawsi to Sa'di (1906)afterlife

Mahmud of Ghazna wanted to be remembered as a patron of letters. He got his wish, in the sense that he is remembered for nothing else — and for failing at it, in one line, on the word of a poet he underpaid.

What he was buying

Browne is blunt about the mechanism. The literary and scientific activity of which Mahmud's court became for a while the focus was assembled, he says, by virtue rather of compulsion than attraction. Scholars were sent for. Al-Biruni came to Ghazna because Khwarazm was annexed and he came with it. The court was famous because the sultan could afford it and could compel attendance, which is not the same thing as being a centre of learning and produces, for a generation, very similar results.

Mahmud himself was the son of Sebuktigin, who had been the slave of Alptigin, who had been the slave of the Samanids — so, as Firdawsi observed, the son of the slave of a slave. He is said to have been the first Muslim ruler to take the title sultan, and he styled himself the Shadow of God on His Earth. At the very end of his life, Ibn al-Athir records him crucifying Isma'ilis, exiling Mu'tazilites, and burning books of philosophy and science.

He had spent thirty years assembling a reputation. It took one satire to spend it.

The satire

Firdawsi had worked on the Shahnama for thirty years and presented it at Ghazna, and the reward was not what he had been led to expect. What he wrote about it afterwards made full use of the pedigree — the grandson of a slave sitting in judgement on the national epic — and it worked.

Browne's summary of the effect is the sharpest sentence in his chapter: the satire turned, as it were, in a breath into infamy that reputation as a patron of letters which the King so eagerly desired.

Five hundred years later Jami wrote the epitaph, and Browne translates it:

Gone is the greatness of Mahmud, departed his glory, And shrunk to "He knew not the worth of Firdawsi" his story.

Whether it is fair

Almost certainly not, in the details. The reward story exists in several incompatible versions, the figures are literary, and the surviving satire may not be entirely Firdawsi's. Browne, who spends a good deal of vol two showing how later anthologists reassigned anecdotes to more famous men, is well aware of it.

It is fair in substance, which is the part that mattered. A ruler who compels scholars to attend him, pays them by the line, and expects a reputation in return, has entered a transaction in which the other party sets the price afterwards and has the last word by profession. Mahmud invaded India twelve times, broke the Samanids, absorbed the Ziyarids and pushed back the Buyids, and none of that is what his name carries.

The other thing that outlived him

There is a second afterlife and it is in the same book.

Firdawsi finished the Shahnama at the court of the man who had just destroyed the dynasty that commissioned the Persian revival, and the poem is about the kings of Iran and their war against Turan. Mahmud was a Turk, the son of a slave, ruling from an Afghan mountain town, paying for the definitive account of Iranian kingship in Persian verse — in which people like him are the enemy.

He paid badly and the poem survived anyway, which is roughly what happened to everything he touched.