Khwarazmian Empire

A post on the lower Oxus

Drafted from Bosworth, Encyclopaedia Iranica · sourceformation

Khwarazm is the delta where the Oxus reaches the Aral Sea: irrigated, wealthy in proportion to its size, and physically separate from everywhere else by desert. The title Khwarazmshah is old, predating Islam by centuries, and the Seljuks inherited it as the name of a provincial post.

In 1077 Malik-Shah gave the post to Anushtigin Gharchai, who was a Turkish slave of the royal household — the man in charge of the sultan's washing bowl, according to the tradition, which the sources repeat because it makes the ending better.

His son held it after him. So did his son. By the mid-twelfth century the Khwarazmshahs were hereditary governors paying tribute to a sultanate whose capacity to collect it was declining, and the sequence from there is the one this entire site is about. Atsiz rebelled against Sanjar repeatedly and was repeatedly forgiven, because Sanjar had other problems and Khwarazm was far away. Il-Arslan stopped pretending. Tekish stopped paying.

The Samanids did this to the Tahirids and the caliphate. Alptigin did it to the Samanids. The Ghurids did it to the Ghaznavids. The difference here is only that Khwarazm was a Seljuk creation from the first day — not an inherited province, not a client house, not a defection, just an appointment that kept being renewed until it did not need renewing.

Taking the title as well

Drafted from Bosworth, The Cambridge History of Iran, Volume 5 (1968)expansion

In 1194 Ala al-Din Tekish met Tughril III, the last Great Seljuk sultan, in battle near Rayy. Tughril was killed. The Seljuk sultanate of Iran ended there, and Tekish took its territory and then its titulature: the Khwarazmshahs styled themselves sultans in the Seljuk manner and presented their rule as the continuation of the sultanate rather than as its replacement.

It is worth being precise about what kind of claim that is, because it is not the obvious one. The Khwarazmshahs were descended from a Seljuk household slave, and descent from somebody is a genealogy and not an inheritance. What they did was different and deliberate: they asserted publicly, in their own titles and in the style of their chancery, that they held the legitimacy of the state they had just extinguished.

Tekish also did what everyone in this thread eventually does. He applied to the caliph al-Nasir for investiture as sultan. Al-Nasir, who was engaged in the unusual project of reconstructing actual Abbasid power in Iraq after three hundred years, refused to be helpful about it, and the relationship between Khwarazm and Baghdad was hostile from then on.

Under Ala al-Din Muhammad II the empire reached from the Aral Sea to the Persian Gulf and from the Punjab frontier to Anatolia. In 1217 he marched on Baghdad to install a caliph of his own choosing and was turned back by snow in the Zagros passes.

Nobody has ever published a figure for how large that empire was. It held its greatest extent for about eight years, which is too short for the people who compile such figures to have bothered.

Throwing off one overlord and finding another

Drafted from Bosworth, The Cambridge History of Iran, Volume 5 (1968)expansion

Between taking the Seljuk sultanate in 1194 and meeting the Mongols in 1219, Khwarazm assembled the largest empire in the eastern Islamic world, and it did it in about twenty years by working through three relationships in sequence.

The first was the Seljuks, whose sultanate Tekish had already taken. The second was the Qara Khitai — the Khitan power that had come west out of north China, destroyed the Seljuk sultan Sanjar on the Qatwan steppe in 1141, and held Transoxiana as a suzerain thereafter. The Karakhanids had spent seventy years under that arrangement, collecting taxes for a Buddhist overlord that was largely indifferent to what its subjects believed. Khwarazm had been paying tribute too.

Ala al-Din Muhammad stopped. Through the 1200s he pushed the Qara Khitai back, and by about 1210 he had beaten them, taken Transoxiana and Samarkand, and extinguished the Karakhanids in the process — the western line went in 1212. An empire that had begun as a Seljuk washing-bowl appointment now ran from the Aral Sea to the Persian Gulf and from the Punjab frontier towards Anatolia.

The third relationship is the one he could not close. Every dynasty in this sequence had eventually applied to Baghdad for a title, and Muhammad applied: he wanted investiture as sultan, and he wanted it from a caliph who was not disposed to give it. Al-Nasir was in the middle of a forty-five-year reign spent reconstructing genuine Abbasid authority in Iraq, and had no interest in licensing a rival.

So Muhammad did something almost nobody had tried. He had a rival caliph proclaimed, of Alid descent, declared al-Nasir deposed, and in 1217 marched on Baghdad to install his own candidate.

Snow in the Zagros passes turned the army back. It is the last thing the Khwarazmian empire attempted before the embassy arrived from the east, and it matters for what happened next: the state that met the Mongols in 1219 had recently quarrelled with the caliphate, destroyed the Qara Khitai buffer that had stood between Transoxiana and the steppe, and made itself the only power between the Oxus and the Euphrates with nobody left to appeal to.

The largest state in the east

Drafted from Bosworth, The Cambridge History of Iran, Volume 5 (1968)peak

By 1217 the Khwarazmshah ruled from the Aral Sea to the Persian Gulf and from the Indian frontier to the edge of Anatolia. On a map it is the largest thing between the Mediterranean and China, and it had been assembled in a single reign.

It is worth setting out what that empire actually consisted of, because the speed with which it disappeared two years later is not a mystery once you have.

Assembled, not built

Everything in it had belonged to somebody else within living memory. The Seljuk sultanate had been taken in 1194. The Qara Khitai protectorate over Transoxiana had been broken by about 1210, and the Karakhanids who had held Samarkand under it were extinguished in 1212. The Ghurid empire in the east came apart after 1206 and Khwarazm took Khurasan out of the wreck; Firuzkuh itself fell to Muhammad in 1215.

Three dynasties in twenty-one years, and none of the territory had been governed from Gurganj for longer than a few years when the Mongols arrived. There had been no time to make anybody's grandchildren loyal.

The army it was held with

The core of the army was Qangli and Qipchaq Turkmen from the steppe north of the Aral, and they came in with the sultan's mother.

Terken Khatun was of that stock, and she kept her own court, her own chancery and her own patronage, and a faction of Qangli commanders who answered to her rather than to her son. Orders went out from Gurganj under two seals. The commanders in the great cities of Transoxiana were her kinsmen, appointed by her, with a claim on her protection.

An army recruited from the same steppe that the Mongols came out of, commanded by men whose loyalty ran to the sultan's mother, garrisoning cities conquered within the last decade, on behalf of a ruler who had just quarrelled with the caliph. That is the state that met Chinggis Khan.

Why it looked strong

None of this was obvious at the time, and it should not be made to look obvious now. Muhammad had beaten the Qara Khitai, who had beaten Sanjar. He had swallowed the Ghurids, who had swallowed the Ghaznavids. His cities were the richest in the eastern Islamic world and his revenues were enormous.

What he did not have was any relationship in his empire that was older than his own reign, and no way of finding out that this mattered until it was tested.

The captured correspondence

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

When Muhammad took Firuzkuh in 1215 and finished the Ghurids, he found their papers, and in them a correspondence between the caliph al-Nasir and the house of Ghazna in which the Commander of the Faithful had been encouraging them to revolt against their overlord.

What he did about it was the single most consequential decision of his reign, and it had nothing to do with the Mongols. He denied that the Abbasids had any valid title to the spiritual leadership of Islam at all, produced a sayyid of his own and set him up as a rival claimant to it, and — in 1217, with a steppe frontier he already knew to be unsettled — marched an army on Baghdad. The campaign achieved nothing. It was broken by a winter of a severity almost unknown in those mountains, and what came back was not an army.

Al-Nasir's side of it is the part that has never been settled. Ibn al-Athir hints and al-Maqrizi states outright that the caliph, finding his overmighty vassal beyond the reach of ordinary intrigue, encouraged the Mongols to invade Khwarazm. Browne, reporting this, cannot help noting what followed: it was at Mongol hands that al-Nasir's own posterity perished and his house fell, forty years later, in the same city he was defending.

Whether or not the invitation was ever sent, the quarrel did the work on its own. Ibn al-Athir's summary of Muhammad's career is unsparing and is the best short account of why the collapse of 1219 went the way it did. By his greed, he says, the Khwarazmshah had weakened or destroyed most of the neighbouring Muslim states in order to build himself an unstable and unwieldy empire; so that when he fled before the Mongols and abandoned his people, there was no Muslim prince left anywhere who could unite the forces of Islam against the invaders. The Ghurids were gone. The Karakhanids were gone. The Qara Khitai were gone. The Seljuk sultanate had been gone for twenty years. And the one authority that might still have called the rest of them together had been publicly told that it was not the caliph.

There is a smaller illustration of the same thing at the other end of the quarrel. The caliph had been making a conspicuous friend of the Nizari grand master at Alamut, who had converted to Sunnism, sent his mother on the pilgrimage and invited the jurists of Qazvin to burn his heretical books — honours pointed enough that Browne dates the estrangement between Khwarazm and Baghdad partly to Muhammad's jealousy of them. When Chinggis Khan crossed the Oxus, the first Muslim ruler to send envoys offering submission was that same grand master.

Muhammad had spent twenty years removing every power in the east that could have stood beside him, and two years insisting that the only remaining source of common authority was a fraud. When the thing he had not prepared for arrived, he was the only ruler in the eastern Islamic world, and there was nobody to ask.

Otrar

Drafted from Bosworth, Encyclopaedia Iranica · sourcecontraction

In 1218 a trade caravan under Mongol protection arrived at Otrar, on the Khwarazmian frontier. The governor, Inalchuq, had the merchants killed as spies and kept the goods. Chinggis Khan sent envoys to demand redress. Ala al-Din Muhammad had the senior envoy killed and the others sent back shaved.

The invasion arrived in 1219 and it took about two years.

The decision that lost it

Muhammad had a large army and chose to distribute it among his cities rather than concentrate it and fight, on the reasoning that the fortified places of Transoxiana could not all be taken at once.

It was not a stupid calculation against any enemy he had previously met. It was catastrophic against this one, because it turned a field campaign into a sequence of sieges, and the Mongols had brought a thousand Chinese engineers with catapults. Otrar, Bukhara, Samarkand and Gurganj were reduced one after another. Nishapur, Merv and Herat followed.

The destruction in Khurasan was of a different order from anything the region had seen. Cities that had been continuously central since the Tahirids — that had held the libraries, the madrasas and the canal systems — stopped being central, and several of them stopped existing.

The flight

Muhammad did not stay to be besieged in any of them. He went west with the Mongol columns behind him, across northern Iran, losing the country a province at a time, and died of pleurisy on an island in the Caspian at the end of 1220 with no territory left at all.

He had ruled the largest state in the eastern world three years earlier. He was buried in borrowed linen because there was nothing else.

That is the end of the Khwarazmian empire as a state. What follows is one man.

His hand was against every man

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

The empire ended in 1220 and the war went on for another eleven years, because Muhammad's son would not stop.

Jalal al-Din Mingburnu is the reason the dynasty has two ending dates. What he did in those eleven years is remarkable, comprehensively unsuccessful, and much stranger than the one episode everybody knows.

The Indus

In 1221 he was overtaken on the bank of the Indus by a Mongol army much larger than his own. He fought from dawn until midday. When the battle was irretrievably lost he made a final charge, turned, stripped off his armour, and put his horse into the river and swam it, with the survivors of his army following him and many of them drowning or shot in the water.

Chinggis Khan is said to have watched and admired it.

What happened to his family at the same crossing is reported two irreconcilable ways, and the disagreement is worth keeping rather than resolving. Juvayni, who wrote for the Mongols, says his mother, his wife and the other women with him fell into Mongol hands. Nasawi, who was his own secretary, says that Jalal al-Din could not save them and had them drowned in the river at their own request, rather than let them suffer worse.

One of those accounts was written by a man on the conquerors' payroll and the other by a man on his. Neither is disinterested and both were in a position to know.

The eight years

Then he rallied what was left, and Browne's summary of what followed is a list because it can only be a list.

He beat off an Indian prince, then threatened the rulers of Sind and Delhi and held ground on their territory until the Mongol pursuit slackened enough to let him back into Iran. In 1223 he stormed through Kirman, Fars and Isfahan to Rayy. In 1225 he defeated and killed the caliph's general, pursued the army almost to the gates of Baghdad, took Tabriz, and attacked Georgia. In 1226 he reduced Tiflis, then had to hurry to the far south-east to punish the ruler of Kirman for intriguing with the Mongols. In 1227 he chastised the Turkmens and the Assassins, beat the Mongols at Damghan and executed four hundred prisoners, defended Isfahan, and turned back to Georgia to kill four of their greatest champions in single combat and rout them. In 1229, while trying to organise a league of Muslim princes against the Mongols, he was surprised and put to flight by thirty thousand of them, and took Ganja anyway.

Browne's verdict is exact: his hand was against every man. He was fighting the Mongols, his own brother's faithlessness, and the disloyalty of his vassals, and he found time besides to attack the caliph, the Turkmens, the Isma'ilis and the Georgians.

That is why the league was never assembled. Nobody in the Islamic east could tell the difference between Jalal al-Din arriving and the Mongols arriving, because both of them burned Tiflis.

The village

After 1229 the fortune fails and so does the man. Browne, following Nasawi, records it without embroidery: he took to drink, and grew purposeless, melancholy and even maudlin, and his grief over the death of a favourite named Qilij was exaggerated and unreasoning.

On 15 August 1231, fleeing from the Mongols, he was murdered in a Kurdish village.

Whether the empire ends in 1220 with the state or in 1231 with the man is not a question with a right answer, and both dates are worth keeping. A state that existed for twenty-six years was destroyed in two, and then a single man conducted its foreign policy for eleven more, badly, alone, against everybody.

The man who wrote it down worked for them

Drafted from Morgan, The Mongols (2007)aside?What aside means

Almost everything known about the destruction of this polity comes from Persians employed by the people who destroyed it.

Juvayni was born into a family of Khurasani administrators who had served the Khwarazmshahs, entered Mongol service as a young man, travelled to Mongolia twice, and wrote his history of the conquests — the Tarikh-i Jahangusha, the history of the world-conqueror — in the 1250s while working for Hulegu. He was present at the reduction of Alamut in 1256, went through the Isma'ili library there and chose what to save before the rest was burned, and was later governor of Baghdad.

His position is therefore impossible and he knows it. He is a Muslim writing about the destruction of Muslim cities for a patron whose grandfather ordered it, in Persian, for readers who had lived through it. What he produces is not propaganda and not lament but something stranger: a work that gives the casualty figures and the sack of Merv and Nishapur in full, calls the invasion a punishment God visited on Islam for its sins — which relieves the Mongols of agency without excusing them — and then argues that Mongol rule is now restoring order and that men like himself should serve it.

Two things follow. The first is that the enormous casualty figures this period is famous for come substantially from him and from writers using him, and modern historians treat them as literary rather than statistical.

The second is subtler and worse. A history written by the losers' administrators for the winners will register the destruction of a state and not the state itself. Nobody had a reason to write down how Khwarazm was governed, what it raised in revenue, or how large it was, because the book that had to be written was about how it fell. An empire that briefly ran from the Aral Sea to the Persian Gulf has no figure attached to it anywhere, and that is not an accident of survival. It is what happens when the only man to write the account is employed by the people who ended the subject.

Nothing continued

Drafted from Bosworth, Encyclopaedia Iranica · sourceafterlife

Every dynasty in this part of the world for four hundred years had been succeeded by something that kept its forms. The Tahirids fell and the Saffarids took Khurasan. The Samanids fell and Ghazna kept the administration, the chancery Persian and the slave-soldier system. The Ghaznavids fell and the Ghurids inherited their Indian project. The Seljuks fell and Khwarazm took the sultanate and the titles.

1231 is not that, and the difference is the whole point of the chapter.

Three zeroes

The Khwarazmshahs left no descendant script, carried no religion beyond a boundary, and had no successor that thought their name was worth claiming.

That last one is the striking absence. Claiming a predecessor was the standard move of the period — the Khwarazmshahs had done it themselves to the Seljuks twenty-five years earlier, in their titles and their chancery style, on a state they had just destroyed. Nobody did it to them. The Mongols did not need to and the local dynasties that came up afterwards under Mongol licence had a Mongol patron to point at instead.

There was, briefly, a Khwarazmian afterlife of a sort in the wrong place. The remnants of Jalal al-Din's army wandered into Syria as a mercenary corps, took Jerusalem in 1244 for an Ayyubid employer, and were destroyed as a fighting force within two years. That is what a dynasty's inheritance looks like when there is nothing to inherit: several thousand horsemen for hire, a long way from home, remembered for sacking a city they had no interest in.

What was actually different

The mechanism that had run the eastern Islamic world for four centuries was always the same one. An instrument of a state — a governor, a guard corps, a client house, an appointed post — becomes heavier than the thing it serves and takes its place, keeping the forms because the forms are what make the new holder legible.

Every dynasty in the sequence is a version of it. The Tahirids were governors. The Samanids were governors. The Ghaznavids were a guard. The Seljuks were frontier auxiliaries. The Khwarazmshahs were an appointed post, held by the descendants of a household slave.

In 1219 something arrived that had never been anybody's instrument. It had not been recruited, appointed, invested or paid; it owed nobody a form; and it had no use for the titles, which is why it did not take them.

What that cost

The cities are the measure. Nishapur, Merv, Herat, Gurganj, Bukhara — the places where the Persian revival had been paid for, where the libraries were, where the canal systems had been maintained since before Islam — were reduced inside two years, and several of them never recovered their position.

The eastern Iranian world after 1231 was governed from Tabriz and Sultaniyya by Mongols, and later by their descendants who had become Muslims and Persian speakers and patrons of exactly the kind of court their great-grandfathers had destroyed. That is a continuity of a sort, and it is not the same thing. It was built by the conquerors on their own terms, from a different direction, with a different story about why they were entitled to it.