Ghurid Sultanate

The last place to convert

Drafted from Bosworth, Encyclopaedia Iranica · sourceformation

Ghur is the mountain country between Ghazna and Herat: high, poor, hard to enter and harder to hold. It was still substantially pagan in the eleventh century, four hundred years after the conquest of Iran, because nobody had found it worth the cost of going in.

Mahmud of Ghazna went in around 1011 and imposed vassalage on the local Shansabani chiefs. Their conversion, their entry into the political world of the region, and their standing all date from that, and for a century and a half they were exactly what such an arrangement produces: a client house supplying troops, occasionally raiding, occasionally being punished.

The dynasty's beginning is therefore a range of a hundred and thirty years, and the width of it is not carelessness. The local tradition carries the Shansabani line back to the ninth century as chiefs of Ghur. The dynasty that appears in the histories begins with Ghaznavid vassalage around 1011. One of those is a lineage and the other is a polity, and no source settles which one the Ghurids ought to be dated from.

The same thinness runs through everything else known about them. Nobody publishes a figure for how much territory they held or how many people lived in it, and the sources cannot agree on the name of the last sultan of Firuzkuh. That is the ordinary condition of a mountain dynasty whose own archive was destroyed with its capital.

The world-burner

Drafted from Bosworth, Encyclopaedia Iranica · sourceexpansion

In 1150 or 1151 Ala al-Din Husayn of Ghur sacked Ghazna. The chronicles say the city burned for seven days, and he was called Jahansuz, world-burner, afterwards.

The stated cause was vengeance: two of his brothers had been killed by the Ghaznavids. The structural cause is duller and more decisive. Ghur was a Ghaznavid client, and the Ghaznavid capacity to discipline its clients had been going since Dandanaqan in 1040. A hundred and ten years of a vassal getting stronger while its overlord got weaker produced exactly one outcome, and the only surprising thing is how long it took.

Ala al-Din did not take Ghazna in the sense of keeping it — the Ghaznavids returned, and then lost the city to Ghuzz Turkmen in 1163. What he did was demonstrate that it could be done.

The generation after him did the rest. Ghiyath al-Din Muhammad held Firuzkuh and Khurasan; his brother Mu'izz al-Din took Ghazna in 1173 and used it as the base for India. Two brothers, one senior and one operational, neither of whom supplanted the other — which is worth noting in a corpus where fraternal arrangements almost always end the way the Buyids' did.

Mu'izz al-Din's India

Drafted from Jackson, The Delhi Sultanate: A Political and Military History (1999)peak

Mahmud of Ghazna had raided India for thirty years and annexed only the Punjab. Mu'izz al-Din of Ghur, in about twenty, took the Gangetic plain and kept it.

He lost his first major engagement, at Tarain in 1191, against Prithviraja Chauhan. He returned the following year, won on the same ground, and the Chauhan kingdom collapsed. Delhi fell in 1193. His generals took Bihar and then Bengal.

The difference from Mahmud is the point, and it is a difference of intent rather than of scale. Mahmud's campaigns were extractive and cyclical: raid, remove the proceeds to Ghazna, repeat. Mu'izz al-Din installed garrisons and governors and left them there. That is the difference between a religion being carried and a country being robbed, and it is why the Ghurid campaigns founded a Muslim state in northern India and Mahmud's, which were larger and more famous, did not.

Then he was assassinated in 1206, near the Indus, with no son.

The Indian conquests were held by his Turkish slave-generals. Qutb al-Din Aibak kept Delhi and Lahore, Bakhtiyar Khalji had taken Bengal, Yildiz held Ghazna, Qabacha held Sind. Aibak's line, and then Iltutmish's, became the Delhi Sultanate, which ruled northern India for three centuries and traced its authority to a Ghurid appointment.

It is the only claim anybody ever made on the Ghurid inheritance, and it is a very large one. A dynasty that held an empire for about thirty years produced a successor state that lasted three hundred, in a country none of its founders had been born in.

The instrument that did not walk away

Drafted from Jackson, The Delhi Sultanate: A Political and Military History (1999)peak

The slave-soldier story always ends the same way. The Abbasids bought Turks to escape depending on provincial armies, and were being deposed by them at Samarra within thirty years. The Samanids raised ghulams with no local landholding and no claim of their own, and one of them walked off with Ghazna in 962 and founded the dynasty that replaced them. The Ayyubids' purchased Bahriyya took the sultanate in 1250. The Safavids broke the Qizilbash with a slave guard and were in due course managed by it. It is the most reliable failure mode in the military history of the region.

The Ghurids ran the same instrument and got a different result, and the difference is worth setting out carefully, because it is why anybody remembers them.

Mu'izz al-Din had no son. His Indian conquests — Delhi, the Gangetic plain, Bihar, Bengal — were held by Turkish slaves he had bought, trained and raised to command: Qutb al-Din Aibak at Delhi and Lahore, Bakhtiyar Khalji in Bengal, Yildiz at Ghazna, Qabacha in Sind. When he was assassinated near the Indus in 1206, the instrument did exactly what the instrument always does. It took the state.

What makes India different is what it took the state into. Aibak did not carve a province off a surviving Ghurid empire; the empire went under within a decade behind him, and there was nothing to secede from. What he held was a conquest a thousand miles from the mountains that had launched it, with no metropole left to answer to, a local revenue base, and an army of men in the same position as himself. So the succession did not fragment the state. It relocated it.

Aibak's line and then Iltutmish's became the Delhi Sultanate, which ruled northern India for three centuries and traced its authority to a Ghurid appointment. The slave system that dissolved every other state that used it is, here, the mechanism by which a thirty-year empire produced a three-hundred-year one.

The reason is not that the Ghurids managed their ghulams better. It is that they died at the right moment, in the wrong place, and left their army holding somewhere worth keeping.

A tower nobody could find

Drafted from Flood, Objects of Translation: Material Culture and Medieval "Hindu-Muslim" Encounter (2009)aside?What aside means

Almost nothing written by the Ghurids survives. Firuzkuh was destroyed and the dynasty's own records went with it, which is why so little can be said about how they governed, how large they were, or even who the last of them was. What they left instead is buildings, and the buildings say a good deal.

The largest is a brick tower sixty-five metres high standing in a river gorge in the mountains of Ghur, at the confluence of the Hari Rud and the Jam, surrounded by nothing. It was raised in the 1190s under Ghiyath al-Din, and it is covered from base to summit in geometric brickwork, glazed turquoise tile and Kufic and naskhi inscription — including, running around it, most of the nineteenth sura, Maryam, which is the sura about the mother of Jesus.

Europe did not know it was there. It was reported in 1886 and then effectively forgotten, and only came to general notice in 1957, when two French archaeologists reached it. The site around it — a palace, fortifications, a pottery kiln, a Jewish cemetery — is very probably Firuzkuh itself, the summer capital the histories keep referring to and which nobody could point at for seven hundred years. It leans, the river undercuts it, an earthquake in 2022 brought bricks down, and it has been on the list of world heritage in danger since the year it was inscribed.

The other end of the empire built too, and built differently. At Delhi, from 1193, the Ghurid governor raised a congregational mosque and beside it the minaret now called the Qutb Minar, and both were constructed substantially out of the dismantled fabric of temples — columns, brackets and carved panels reused as columns, brackets and carved panels. Flood's argument, against the usual reading, is that reuse of this kind is not adequately described either as pure iconoclasm or as pure economy: it was a common medieval practice of appropriating the prestige of what was taken, done by rulers on all sides of the period's religious lines, and reading it only as a statement about religion imports a later quarrel into a twelfth-century building site.

Two towers, then, two thousand kilometres apart, put up within a few years of each other by the same family: one in an empty gorge that nobody visited for seven centuries, one in a city that became the capital of northern India for three. The dynasty that built them lasted about thirty years as an empire, and this is the part of it still standing.

The road back from Khwarazm

Drafted from al-Juzjani, Tabakat-i-Nasiri: A General History of the Muhammadan Dynasties of Asia (1881)contraction

In 1204 Mu'izz al-Din went north to finish the Khwarazmshah. It was the one war the Ghurids fought against an equal, and it took them about six months to stop being an imperial power in Khurasan.

Muhammad Khwarazmshah heard the preparations coming and went home ahead of them, calling in horse and foot from Khurasan and sending to the Gur Khan of the Qara Khitai for help. Juzjani, who wrote for the Delhi sultans and remembered the Ghurids fondly, gives the Ghurid army enough elephants to drink the Oxus dry; his translator, who argues with him in the footnotes for a page at a time, notes that the sober figures are large enough without the poetry. Mu'izz al-Din reached the east bank of the river, arranged his elephants, and gave orders to find a ferry for the morning.

The news that arrived that night was that Muhammad had come back, that the sultan of Samarkand was with him, and that the Qara Khitai were on the road. Mu'izz al-Din burnt his heavy baggage in the dark and started back along the Oxus. He had already sat in front of Khwarazm itself for five days and given it up — not enough siege equipment, not enough forage, a campaign that had gone on too long. The Khwarazmians came after him at dawn. At Hazarasp the Ghurids turned and fought; their right wing went first and the rest went with it, and more of the elephants and the war material was lost in the pursuit.

They were still retreating when they reached Andkhud and found the road shut. The Qara Khitai under Banjko of Taraz were across it, and closing from every side. The Ghurids fought from dawn until the sun went down and darkness stopped it. One account puts their dead at fifty thousand; another says they broke on the first charge, which the translator thinks likelier than his author's version and says so.

What happened during the night decided the rest. Husain ibn Kharmil, who commanded the vanguard and had spent the afternoon urging the sultan to attack again in the morning, looked at the fresh and countless enemy and at horses that had walked from Khwarazm, and rode off towards Juzarwan with five thousand of his own, and most of the men whose mounts were finished went too. At dawn Mu'izz al-Din drew up what was left of the centre and his own slaves and started the battle anyway. Juzjani says he stood until about a hundred horsemen remained, that the arrows sticking in his canopy made it look like a porcupine, and that he would not turn his head, until a Turkish slave called Ayaz Juki took hold of his bridle and dragged him to the fort of Andkhud.

The Qara Khitai invested the fort and began cutting through the walls. What got him out was the sultan of Samarkand, riding with the besiegers, who sent in word that he did not wish a Muslim sovereign to be killed by unbelievers and that if Mu'izz al-Din would surrender what was left of his elephants, his animals, his treasure, his arms and his armour, that could be made to buy his life. He agreed, and reached his own territory alive.

He had marched north to annex Khwarazm. He came back with a hundred horsemen, having paid the contents of his baggage train for permission to leave. Khurasan was gone, and it was not coming back; two years remained, and they were spent in India.

Squeezed out

Drafted from Bosworth, Encyclopaedia Iranica · sourceend

Ghiyath al-Din died in 1203 and Mu'izz al-Din in 1206, and the state did not survive both of them.

It had already lost the argument in the field. The Khwarazmians were by then the strongest power in the east and the Qara Khitai still the protectors of everything north of the Oxus, and after the two of them shut the road at Andkhud the Ghurid claim to Khurasan was a claim and nothing else.

Then Mu'izz al-Din was assassinated near the Indus, with no son.

What went where

The Indian provinces went to the slave-generals within months and never came back. Ghazna went to Yildiz, Sind to Qabacha, Delhi and Lahore to Aibak, Bengal to the Khalji.

What was left was Ghur itself: the mountains the dynasty had started in, held by a succession of short-reigned sultans whom the sources record so inconsistently that the name of the last one cannot be established. Firuzkuh fell to Ala al-Din Muhammad of Khwarazm in 1215, and the summer capital, its palace and its archive went with it.

The shape of it

Roughly thirty years elapsed between the Ghurids taking Ghazna and losing Firuzkuh. It is one of the shortest imperial careers anybody has had, and it produced one of the longest-lasting successor states.

The reason those two facts belong in the same sentence is that they have the same cause. An empire held together by one man's appointments, in country that could not support it, at the far end of a march from mountains that produced nothing, was never going to outlive the man. What it could do — and what it did — was put able men in charge of a rich country a thousand miles away and then die before it could recall them.

Bought at Delhi

Drafted from al-Juzjani, Tabakat-i-Nasiri: A General History of the Muhammadan Dynasties of Asia (1881)afterlife

The Ghurid empire lasted about thirty years. The state its slaves founded lasted three hundred, and the fullest account of how that happened was written by a man who had grown up in Ghurid country and ended his life at the court of a Ghurid slave's descendant.

The transaction

Juzjani tells the story of Iltutmish's purchase in some detail, because by the time he was writing it had become the origin story of the dynasty he served.

Shams al-Din Iltutmish was a Turkish slave who had been taken to Ghazna and could not be sold there, because an order had been issued that nobody was to buy him. He was moved to Bukhara for three years, brought back to Ghazna for another, and still could not be purchased.

Then Qutb al-Din Aibak — who was himself, at that point, still a slave — came to Ghazna after the Gujarat campaign, heard the story, and asked Sultan Mu'izz al-Din for permission to buy him.

The sultan's answer is the sentence the whole afterlife turns on. Since a command has been issued that he should not be purchased at Ghazna, let them take him to the city of Delhi, and there he can be purchased.

So Aibak left an officer behind with instructions to bring the two slaves down to Delhi on his return, and bought Iltutmish there.

And then the recommendation

It gets better. Some years later Mu'izz al-Din sent for Iltutmish, gave him a special robe of honour, ordered his deed of manumission drawn up — and told Aibak, in Juzjani's rendering: treat Iltutmish well, for he will distinguish himself.

Set that beside what happened next. Mu'izz al-Din was assassinated in 1206. Aibak took Delhi and Lahore and reigned until he died at Lahore, whereupon the commander of troops and the lord justice of Delhi wrote to Iltutmish. Iltutmish took the sultanate and is, by common consent, the real founder of the Delhi Sultanate — the man who consolidated it, obtained investiture from Baghdad for it, and made it a state rather than a garrison.

The Ghurid sultan personally authorised the sale of that man to that buyer, in that city, and then recommended him.

The historian

Minhaj al-Din Juzjani was from a family of scholars in the highlands of Herat. His maternal ancestors had held the qadi-ship of the fortified town of Tulak, in the Ghurid mountains, by diploma from the caliph, and he kept the documents. He was, in every sense that mattered to him, a man of Ghur.

He wrote the Tabaqat-i Nasiri at Delhi and dedicated it to Sultan Nasir al-Din Mahmud Shah, a grandson of Iltutmish — who gave him a cloak, a turban and a caparisoned horse for it, and a stipend afterwards for a verse account of a campaign. The commander of that campaign, Balban, gave him the revenues of a village.

So the standard history of the Ghurids was written by a Ghurid, in India, for the grandson of a slave his sultan had once given orders about, and paid for with a village in the Punjab.

What that is an afterlife of

Nothing else the Ghurids did survives in this way. The dynasty produced no literature anyone kept, no administrative tradition, no line of successors in its own country. Its capital is a tower in a gorge that Europe could not locate for seven hundred years.

What it produced was three or four capable men whom it had bought as boys, and a country to put them in. That turned out to be enough — and the man who wrote it all down had to move two thousand kilometres to be somewhere it still mattered.