Khanate of Khiva

A delta with a desert round it

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

Khwarazm is an irrigated island. The Oxus comes down out of the mountains, spreads into a delta before the Aral Sea, and around that green triangle in every direction there is sand — the Kara Kum to the south, the Kizil Kum to the east, the Ust-Urt plateau to the north-west, the Caspian beyond that.

Everything about the khanate that grew there follows from the geography.

Why it existed

It was one of the oldest settled countries in Central Asia and one of the richest per acre, because the delta silt and the canals grew wheat, melons and cotton in a place that has almost no rain. It was also, by the sixteenth century, politically separate from Transoxiana in a way it had not always been, because the desert between them was two weeks wide.

When the Uzbek conquest swept south out of the Kipchak steppe, the Shaybanid princes who took Khwarazm were a different branch from the ones who took Bukhara, and the two lines stayed distinct and hostile for three hundred years. Ilbars took the country in 1511 — Abu'l-Ghazi dates it 911 of the Hijra, and Howorth points out that this is clearly a mistake — and his descendants held it.

Why nobody could take it

Because to reach it you had to cross the desert, and armies that crossed the desert arrived in no condition to fight.

That single fact protected the khanate against Persia, against Bukhara, and for a century and a half against Russia. Peter the Great sent an expedition under Prince Bekovich-Cherkassky in 1717 that reached the country and was destroyed there. A second Russian attempt turned back. The desert did the work.

It also meant that everyone who did make the journey — merchants, pilgrims, envoys, Persian peasants caught in a raid — arrived exhausted, and that the roads across it were the khanate's hunting ground.

The other consequence

A small, wealthy, unreachable state on the edge of a desert full of Turkmen horsemen has one obvious export, and Khiva made it an institution.

The slave trade was not incidental. Persians taken on the Khorasan frontier and Russians taken on the Caspian shore were brought to the Khivan markets in numbers large enough to constitute an economy, and the khanate's relations with Persia, with Russia and with the Turkmen tribes on whom it depended for both cavalry and captives were all organised around it. Vámbéry, travelling with a Turkmen caravan in 1863, met Persian slaves at every stage, and a Russian sailor among them.

Abolishing it was the first thing the Russians wrote into the treaty in 1873.

What kind of state

Vámbéry's summary of the constitution is that it was of Mongol origin: a khan or padishah chosen from the midst of a victorious race, with a fixed set of named officers beside him.

In practice the khan disposed despotically of the property and lives of his subjects, with no check on him except the ulema, and then only when the ulema were led by men whose learning and irreproachable lives had made them objects of affection to the people and of dread to the khan.

That was the theory in 1863. By then the khans had for two generations been whatever their prime ministers said they were.

The khan who wrote it down

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

Nearly everything known about Khwarazm before the eighteenth century comes from a book written by one of its khans about his own family, and his family behaved appallingly.

What he recorded

Abu'l-Ghazi Bahadur Khan was a son of Arab Muhammad Khan, and the story he tells about his father is not flattering to anybody in it.

Around 1618 two of his brothers — Habash, aged sixteen, and Ilbars, fourteen — rose in revolt from Khiva and marched on Urgench. Summoned to their father and offered a governorship, they refused to come until they had gathered a force, and the adventurous young Uzbeks came in to them. Their father was too weak or too indulgent to stop it. They raided Khorasan, sent him presents out of the proceeds, and came back and camped outside his capital.

The khan sent an officer to look at them. The officer came back and reported that every Uzbek from Darughan Ata to Bakirghan Ata had joined them and that he had been received with shouts of defiance, and advised retreat to Khiva.

The Khan was a weak person — Abu'l-Ghazi's own phrase about his father, and, as Howorth notes, a fact the historian cannot hide. He did not send to find out whether the report was exaggerated. He left for Khiva at once.

The grain

The detail that shows what kind of historian Abu'l-Ghazi was is what comes next.

The whole district from Mizdakhkan to Kuighun, he says, was one large field of wheat — because the year before he was born his father had cut a canal running by Tuk and Kuighun into the Aral Sea, closed when the sun was in Libra and opened again after harvest, and years later more than a bowshot across. In consequence wheat was very cheap.

The rebels seized the state granaries and won the poor over by distributing the grain.

That is a man explaining a political collapse by way of hydraulic engineering and the price of wheat, in the 1660s.

The end of the family

His father ceded the town of Vezir to the rebels and they lived there quietly for five years. In the sixth, Ilbars seized Khiva, sent five hundred men to take his father prisoner on the road home, scattered his treasures — among the dogs and the birds — and deposed his officers.

Abu'l-Ghazi and another brother sided with their father, and argued with him, in vain, that this was the moment to crush the rebels. He vacillated and leaned on an atalik who was secretly with the other side. Five months later he changed his mind and marched on his sons in open daylight instead of surprising them as Abu'l-Ghazi advised, and was beaten at the canal of Tashli Yarmish and taken.

Habash had him blinded. He was sent to Khiva and then to Qum with three wives and two younger sons. The next year Ilbars had him put to death, with a brother and two nephews. Another brother was sent off to Russia, where he died in 1648 and was buried at Kasimov in a hospice built by his widow — the daughter of a Kasimov khan, in a Tatar appanage inside the Russian state.

Abu'l-Ghazi went to Bukhara, and then into a long exile in Persia, and came back twenty years later to take the throne.

Why the book matters

He had every reason to write a lie and did not write one.

He records that his father was weak, that his brothers were fourteen and sixteen when they began, that the Uzbeks deserted the khan, that the rebels were more popular because they gave away the grain, and that the whole thing ended with a blinded old man dying in Qum. He also records the canal, the dates, the tribal divisions, the routes and the genealogies, which is why every later account of Khwarazm — including the one in front of you — is downstream of him.

The rulers of the other two Uzbek khanates left no comparable book. That is the one respect in which Khiva, the smallest and poorest of the three, is the best documented.

How much longer must I support this puppet

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)contraction

By the middle of the eighteenth century the khan of Khiva was a Kazakh prince imported for the purpose, kept in seclusion and shown to the people three times a year.

The inaqs

The real government belonged to the inaq — the prime minister, the senior bi of the Uzbek tribes. The office had become hereditary in the Qungrat family, who were also governors of Hazarasp, and by the 1750s they had made the khanship ornamental.

The daily routine of the arrangement survives. The khan sat in brocade; every day the inaq and the grandees had an audience with him; the courtiers went to the palace and the inaq sat beside him. Ishmed became inaq in 1755 and held the post for seventeen years, and the office passed from father to son after him.

Why keep a khan at all? For the same reason the Manghits kept the Janids at Bukhara and Edigü kept khans at Sarai: because the title required Chinggisid descent and the Qungrats did not have it. So they sent to the Kazakh steppe for a Jochid, installed him, fed him, and did not let him be seen.

Iltazar

Ivaz Inaq died in 1804. The eldest son declined the succession in favour of his brother Iltazar, who was proclaimed inaq and for six months paid his daily respects to the Kazakh khan in the citadel.

Then he called his brother in one night and made the case.

Timurlenk, Nadir Shah, and Muhammed Rahim of Bukhara were none of them khan's sons, but men like themselves who had earned their own fortunes.

Thanks to God, I have judgment, courage, and soldiers. How much longer must I support this puppet?

His brother approved and recited the fatiha over it. The next day Iltazar had the Kazakh khan brought out of the fortress and sent home, telling him that another would be sent for to fill his place. Instead he raised ten thousand Uzbeks in armour, summoned the ulema, the ataliqs and the inaqs, and told them he had become their ruler himself and they had no further need of a Kazakh khan.

Everyone assented and called down blessings on him except Bek Pulad, the ataliq of the Uyghur tribe, who said it was not worthy of him, that he should imitate his father and his ancestors, and that it might not be God's pleasure that he should bring so grave a matter to a happy conclusion. Since everyone else was unanimous he eventually acquiesced. Iltazar remembered it.

The same year, two khanates

It is worth putting the two events side by side, because they are the same event.

At Bukhara in 1785 the Manghit ataliq set aside the last Janid and took power, and solved the descent problem by calling himself amir instead of khan. At Khiva in 1804 the Qungrat inaq set aside an imported Kazakh and took the title of khan anyway, and dared anybody to say otherwise.

Both dynasties were Uzbek tribal families that had been running the administration for generations. Both ruled until 1920. Neither had a drop of Chinggisid blood, and by the nineteenth century it no longer mattered — which is the real end of the Mongol political inheritance in Central Asia, two centuries after the last khan who could actually claim it stopped mattering.

Forty-headed coats

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

In the summer of 1863 a lame Hungarian in rags, travelling as a dervish returning from Mecca, was brought before the khan of Khiva and asked to bless him. What he saw in the days that followed is the most specific account there is of how this khanate rewarded its soldiers.

The audience

Vámbéry knew the risk exactly. The khan was in the habit of enslaving strangers of doubtful character — he had recently done it to a Hindustani who claimed princely birth and was now dragging artillery carriages — and the khan's cruelty, Vámbéry notes, was displeasing even to the Tatars.

At the gate the pious handed bread and dried fruit up to them on their camels. In the bazaar people kissed his hands and feet and the rags hanging off him. At the customs house an Afghan in the caravan announced loudly that they had brought to Khiva three interesting quadrupeds and a no less interesting biped, and the words spy, Frenghi and Russian went round in the whispering.

He got through it by presenting himself to a former Khivan ambassador to Constantinople who could not afford to admit he did not recognise him, and by producing an Ottoman passport with the sultan's seal at the top, which the minister kissed and pressed to his forehead.

The khan was on a dais with his left arm on a velvet cushion and a short golden sceptre in his right hand. Vámbéry recited a sura, two blessings and a prayer and everybody stroked their beards. He was offered twenty ducats and a stout ass; declined the money as sinful for a dervish, took the ass, and pointed out that the holy commandment prescribed a white one.

Afterwards, alone in his cell, he wrote what he had actually seen: deep-set eyes, a chin thinly covered with hair, white lips, a trembling voice — the real picture of an enervated and savage tyrant — and let out a long breath at how well it had gone.

The coats

While collecting his board money from the treasurer, he found that official sorting robes of honour to be sent to the army in the field.

There were about four kinds, silk, in staring colours with large flowers worked in gold. He heard them called four-headed, twelve-headed, twenty-headed and forty-headed coats. There were no heads on them, in paint or embroidery, so he asked why.

The plainest coat was the reward for having cut off four enemy heads. The finest was for forty.

Somebody suggested that if this was not the custom in the land of Rum, he should go to the main square next morning and watch the distribution.

The square

He went, and about a hundred horsemen came in from the camp covered in dust.

Each had at least one prisoner with him — among them children and women — bound either to his horse's tail or to the pommel of his saddle. Each also had a large sack buckled behind him containing the heads of his enemies, the evidence of his exploits.

He handed over the prisoners as presents to the khan or some other great man. Then he unfastened his sack, took it by the two lower corners as if he were about to empty potatoes, and rolled the heads out in front of the accountant, who kicked them together into a heap with his feet until it was several hundred high. Each man was given a receipt for the number delivered, and a few days later came the day of payment.

What it was for

This was not a pogrom or a massacre. It was a payroll.

The heads were counted by an accountant, recorded on receipts, converted into a grade of coat and paid out on a scheduled day. The prisoners were transferred as gifts within the elite. The system was routine enough that a treasurer sorting garments could explain the price list to a stranger without embarrassment, and that a bystander could recommend the ceremony as a sight worth seeing.

Vámbéry's own next sentence is the one that has troubled every reader since: that in spite of these barbarous usages and these startling scenes, it was in Khiva and its provinces that he passed the most agreeable days of his whole journey, pelted with gifts by strangers who wanted nothing from him but his blessing.

Both things were true at once, in the same city, in the same week. That is the hardest thing about the record this khanate left, and the reason for setting it down exactly as the witness did.

Eighteen tenghe on ten tanab

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

The most useful pages Vámbéry wrote are the driest: a working account of how the khanate raised its money, which is also an account of who it could not tax and therefore who really ran it.

Salgit

The land tax. For every ten tanab of cultivable ground — a tanab being sixty square ells — the khan received eighteen tenghe, about ten shillings.

Exempt from it were three classes: the warriors, the noker or atli; the ulema; and the khoja, the descendants of the Prophet.

Read that list again. The men with the weapons, the men with the religious authority and the men with the hereditary prestige all paid nothing. Everybody else — the Sart farmers of the delta, the irrigators, the townsmen — paid for the state. No Khivan khan could ever tax the only three groups capable of removing him, which is a complete explanation of why the khanship went the way it did.

The kushbegi and the mehter collected it, making a circuit every year through the main districts and holding the local elders responsible for their departments.

Zekiat

The customs. Imported goods paid two and a half per cent of their value. Cattle, camels and horses paid a tenghe a head and sheep half a tenghe, annually — and only from owners of more than ten, which is what constituted a herd.

The collection was in the hands of a favourite mehrem of the khan, who went round the nomad tribes with a secretary. Since the cattle could not be counted, he simply taxed each tribe at a rate agreed with its elders.

Vámbéry then delivers the punchline without raising his voice. The principal profit of this operation found its way into the mehter's sack; the khan had been told the previous year that the Karakalpak had only six thousand oxen and the Yomut and Chaudor only three thousand sheep between them; and this, Vámbéry was told, was about a third of the truth.

What the numbers describe

A state collecting a fixed tax from a settled population it controlled, and a negotiated tribute from a nomad population it did not, with two-thirds of the second disappearing en route.

The settled delta paid and had no weapons. The Turkmen tribes had the weapons and paid what they felt like. The khan needed the Turkmen for cavalry and could not coerce them, and the two groups were not the same people and did not like each other.

That balance is the whole domestic politics of Khiva, and it is why the khanate could put a hundred horsemen in the field with sacks of heads and could not have resisted a European brigade for a week. What kept it alive was never its strength. It was the desert.

Three columns

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

In the summer of 1873 the Russians did the thing everybody had said could not be done, and the khanate ended in a season.

What had protected it

Peter the Great's expedition under Bekovich-Cherkassky had reached Khiva in 1717 and been destroyed there. A second attempt, in the winter of 1839, never arrived: the weather broke the column and it turned back short of the oasis. For a hundred and fifty years the desert had been a better defence than any army, and the khans had correspondingly little reason to be careful.

What changed

Steam, the Aral flotilla, the forts up the Syr Darya, the conquest of Tashkent and the Bukharan settlement of 1868. By 1873 Russia held the whole northern and eastern approach and could supply columns from bases instead of from the saddle.

Three of them converged on the delta at once — from Tashkent, from Orenburg, from the Caspian — and the arithmetic that had protected Khiva since Ilbars stopped working. The city was taken. The khan kept his throne.

He ceded everything on the right bank of the Oxus, paid an indemnity, opened the khanate to Russian merchants free of duty, accepted that his foreign relations would be conducted for him — and abolished slavery, which was the institution the campaign had been publicly justified by and the khanate's oldest industry.

Schuyler

Eugene Schuyler was in Turkistan that year, and his account is the reason the campaign is known as more than a Russian communiqué.

He was an American consul with no stake in the enterprise, and he wrote about how the campaign was actually conducted — the treatment of the Turkmen, the conduct of the troops — in terms that were not welcome in St Petersburg and cost him professionally. A government that has just liberated slaves does not enjoy being told what its soldiers did on the way.

The shape of the ending

Set the three khanates side by side and the pattern is exact.

Bukhara lost Samarkand in 1868, signed, and kept its emir until 1920. Khiva lost its capital in 1873, signed, and kept its khan until 1920. Kokand's khan fled his own rebels in 1875, and Kokand was annexed outright, wiped off the map and renamed Ferghana.

The ones that surrendered survived as protectorates. The one that collapsed into revolt was absorbed. Whether a Central Asian dynasty lasted another half-century turned not on how hard it fought but on whether it could still control its own subjects when the Russians arrived.

Khiva could. It had spent three centuries unreachable behind a desert, and it ended by being the more governable of the two survivors — a khanate of one irrigated delta, which had lived on a river, a tax on ten tanab of ground, and the people it caught on the roads.