Khanate of Kokand

A valley of towns

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

Fergana is the best land in Central Asia: a bowl a hundred and fifty miles long between the Tian Shan and the Alai, watered by the head of the Syr Darya, with more towns in it than the rest of Turkistan put together. It was the last part of the region to become a state, because there was too much of everything and no obvious centre.

No history

Schuyler opens his account of the khanate with an admission worth quoting, because every date that follows depends on it.

Fergana had been part of Chagatai's share of the inheritance and shared the fate of Transoxiana; it was an appanage of Samarkand in Babur's time; after that it was sometimes rebellious, sometimes conquered, sometimes in one prince's hands and sometimes another's, and it does not emerge as a separate and independent country until toward the beginning of the nineteenth century. No written historical account by a native author had ever seen the light. What was known came from tradition and oral report, strengthened here and there by coins and documents.

The khanate of Kokand is the only one of the three that never wrote itself down.

What tradition says

Popular tradition and the Chinese records agree that in the middle of the eighteenth century Fergana was not under one rule but divided among separate cities, provinces and clans, each with its own bek or khoja.

The founding story, from a Kokandi informant quoted by Ritter, is brief and typical. Some time in the last century, Shahrukh Bek came with some of his countrymen from the Volga region to Fergana, married the daughter of Ediger Khoja, the ruler of Khurram-Sarai, and settled with his Uzbeks at Kukan, twelve miles west of the present city. Then he murdered his father-in-law and made himself ruler of the district, and profiting by the dissensions and weakness of his neighbours he soon extended his sway.

His eldest son succeeded him, then his brother Abd al-Karim, who built the present city of Kokand and moved his residence there. Then Erdeni, his nephew.

The Ming

The dynasty belonged to the Ming, one of the Uzbek tribes — not Chinggisids, and not, unlike the Manghits at Bukhara and the Qungrats at Khiva, a family that had spent generations as ministers to a legitimate line before taking it.

They simply took a district and grew. That is why Kokand's rulers never agonised over titles the way their neighbours did, and also why nothing ever settled the question of who should hold the throne. A dynasty that begins by murdering its father-in-law has no argument to offer the next man who tries it.

Schuyler's narrative of the khanate's last forty years is, in consequence, almost entirely a list of pretenders.

Horses that sweat blood

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

The event that made Kokand a state happened two hundred miles east of it and had nothing to do with anybody in Fergana. The Qing destroyed the Dzungars.

1750

Qing armies came over the Tian Shan in pursuit of the Dzungars and then of the khojas of the Tarim, and in 1750 the general Zhao Hui detached officers to deal with the Kirghiz of the mountains.

Erdeni Bek entertained these officers at Kokand, and when they left he sent one of his own officials after them to tender his submission to the Qianlong emperor.

The other beks of Fergana followed him — Tokhto Muhammad of Andijan, Has Ping-li of Marghilan — and in 1760 they sent embassies and tribute to Beijing, Tokhto Muhammad going in person. Tashkent had submitted two years earlier.

Among the gifts sent to the emperor were horses that sweat blood, the argamaks of Fergana that Chinese writers had been describing since the Han; great eagles and falcons for hunting; and plates of the fountain of the dragon.

What submission bought

Not subjection. Erdeni went on doing as he liked: he invaded Osh in 1762 and was ordered by the Qing governor-general to withdraw his troops, and raided the Kirghiz again in 1763 and was blamed by an imperial decree. He died in 1770.

What the submission bought was standing. The Chinese geographer records that the beks of all the other towns in Fergana were under Erdeni's rule and obeyed his orders, and that is the first statement in the record that Fergana had one ruler. Tendering tribute to Beijing, and being recognised by Beijing as the man who spoke for the valley, settled among Fergana's own quarrelling towns a question they had not been able to settle themselves.

The frontier that opened

The other consequence was commercial and enormous.

The Qing conquest of the Tarim opened the passes. Kashgar and Yarkand — which the Dzungars had governed for eighty years as tributaries — were now part of an empire that wanted trade, and the shortest road to them from the west ran over the Terek Dawan out of Fergana. Kokandi merchants took it, and Kokandi merchant colonies established themselves in the Tarim cities and became, in time, an interest the khanate would fight about.

At the same moment Russia was coming down the Syr Darya from the north-west. For about a century Kokand sat between the two advancing empires with a monopoly of the road between them, which is exactly how a valley of quarrelling towns became the largest and best-peopled of the three khanates — three million people, by Vámbéry's estimate, more than Bukhara and far more than Khiva.

The cowardice of cities

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

Vámbéry never reached Kokand. He compiled his account of it in Bukhara and Samarkand from people who had been there, which makes it hearsay — and his verdict on its people is the harshest thing in his book, and the most useful.

Who lived there

Uzbeks formed the settled population, and were of a type quite distinct from the Uzbeks of Khiva or Bukhara. The name had by then become a social category rather than a descent: because the Uzbeks had been the dominant race in Turkistan for centuries and had adopted the institutions of Islam earlier than the other nomads, the name carried prestige, and Kirghiz, Kipchaks and Kalmyks who settled in the cities generally dropped their own nationality and called themselves Uzbek. Half of those who did so in Kokand, Vámbéry reckons, were really a mixture of the nomad peoples.

Next came the Tajiks, more compact here than anywhere else — whole towns and villages of them, Khojend entirely, and Namangan, Andijan and Marghilan said to be largely so.

Then, outside the towns and above them, the Kirghiz and the Kipchaks.

The judgement

Judging from his outside appearance, as he presents himself in his clumsy loose clothes, the Ozbeg of Khokand seems a very helpless person. We had many opportunities of witnessing his unexampled cowardice, and, had it not been for the protection of the nomads, his cities would have long fallen under the dominion of China, Russia, or Bokhara.

That is a European gentleman-traveller being contemptuous about townsmen, and it should be read as such. But the political observation underneath it is exactly right, and it is the key to the whole khanate.

Who actually held the state

The settled valley produced the revenue. The nomads provided the fighting.

The Kirghiz of the mountains and the Kipchaks of the steppe were not the khan's subjects in the sense the farmers of Fergana were. They were a constituency he had to keep, with their own leaders, their own grievances and the ability to walk away or to march on the capital. In 1842 it was the Kipchaks who retook Kokand from the Bukharan garrison and put a new khan on the throne; in 1875 it was the Kirghiz whose advance the cities were sending messages to hurry along, promising to rise against the khan when they arrived.

The three khanates had the same structural problem and solved it differently. Bukhara hired Turkmen mercenaries at four thousand tilla a year rather than arm its own tributaries. Khiva exempted its warriors from the land tax and lived alongside Turkmen it could not coerce. Kokand made the nomads the army and then discovered it could not stop them choosing the government.

Vámbéry's sentence has the causation the wrong way round. It was not that the nomads protected the cities. It was that the cities had handed them the state.

Four times overreached

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

The war with Bukhara over the Syr Darya towns ran for twenty years and ended with the khanate intact and unable to govern itself, which is the worst of both outcomes.

The loop

Muhammad Ali held Kokand from 1822, and the quarrel with the emir Nasrullah ran on a loop.

The emir marched; Muhammad Ali retreated; when the retreat could go no further he was beaten at Khojend and the city was taken. He fell back again, found himself still pursued and his own capital threatened, and sent a flag of truce. Peace was made at Kohna Badam: Kokand ceded Khojend and much besides.

Then Nasrullah could not resist an extra turn of the knife and appointed as governor of the ceded province Muhammad Ali's own brother and rival, who had taken refuge at Bukhara. Their mother reconciled the two brothers, and before the emir had heard anything about it Khojend and the other towns had rejoined Kokand, and he had two enemies where he had had one.

1842

His fury, Vámbéry says, knew no bounds.

He added ten thousand Tekke and Salor Turkmen to his thirty thousand horse, marched so fast that Muhammad Ali had to fly from his own capital, caught him near Marghilan and executed him ten days later in Kokand with his brother and his two sons. Most of their supporters went to the executioners after them and the property was confiscated. To excuse it, Nasrullah put about that Muhammad Ali had married his own mother and had therefore been put to death.

The emir went home loaded with booty, leaving a governor and two thousand men.

The three months

The Kipchaks, who had stayed neutral all through, grew tired of the Bukharans, took the city, made the garrison prisoners and put Muhammad Ali's son Shir Ali on the throne.

Then, so as not to be surprised again, the Kokandis decided to wall off the quarter containing the khan's residence — and built the wall with the forced labour of the captured Bukharan garrison.

Nasrullah sent fifteen thousand men back under a Kokandi pretender he had been keeping. On the march the pretender made his peace 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. A fifth army got as far as Ura-Tepe and stopped, because the emir had fallen ill at Samarkand; he went home to Bukhara and died.

What was left

Kokand had survived the strongest neighbour it had, lost its khan and most of its ruling family, and come out of it with a new wall.

It had also learned the lesson that destroyed it. The Kipchaks had made the khan. The regent Musulman Kul who came out of that settlement ruled in the boy's name and was eventually killed for it; his son spent thirty years waiting to avenge him, and led the rebellion that finished the khanate. The pattern set in those three months — a nomad faction installs a khan, governs through him, is destroyed, and produces the next claimant — ran without interruption until the Russians ended it.

The voices in the next room

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

Khudayar Khan ruled Kokand off and on for thirty years, was driven out three times, and spent his last years so frightened that he could only sleep to the sound of his servants talking.

The plots

Schuyler's account of 1873 to 1875 reads like a court chronicle written by an insurance assessor, and the detail is the point.

The insurrection of 1873 died out with the cold weather and the khan retook his cities with little opposition. In 1874 it began again as a plot to put his second son on the throne, prepared by an uncle — and given away, it is said, by the young man's own talkativeness. The uncle and sixteen conspirators were summoned to the palace and never came out; it was supposed they were drowned in a pond inside it. The mekhter was poisoned by the khan's order for not having warned him.

That same mekhter had earlier been suspected of embezzling the customs funds and put to an ordeal: bound onto a thin lattice thrown across a deep ravine, over which a horse was galloped several times, the whole thing threatening at every moment to break. He came out alive and was therefore held innocent — at least, Schuyler adds, of that offence.

The Kirghiz and Kipchaks then looked for another claimant and found a boy of sixteen living at Khojend who is said not to have known his own descent; at Khudayar's request the Russians moved him to Tashkent under strict surveillance.

The fear

The failure of the plots did not restore the tranquillity Khudayar had previously enjoyed. He became sombre and distrustful. His bodyguard of four hundred picked men, trained to the trust from infancy, no longer inspired the same confidence. He felt menaced everywhere and at all times and saw dangers where there were none, and for a long time did not leave his palace at all.

The door of his room was watched day and night by a slave named Nasim Toga, who was blindly attached to him and had orders to let nobody in — not his wives, not his children — without consulting him.

And he could only be lulled to sleep by the voices of three of his most faithful servants, ordered to stay in the next room and to keep themselves constantly audible, as a palpable proof that watch was being kept.

His eldest son was put under surveillance. The system of espionage across the khanate was carried to its utmost limits; his best spy was a rich Kokand merchant with agents inside the Russian possessions as well as his own, who naturally played his master's affairs to build his own fortune.

1875

In 1875 General Kaufmann, wanting a bargain with the khan, handed back the boy pretender and sent him to Kokand.

While the Russian embassy was still in the city the rebellion broke out again, and its leader was the Aftobachi — the son of the regent Musulman Kul, who had been waiting since 1842 to avenge his father's murder.

Everything had been prepared. The army deserted in a mass. Khudayar's own brother and his sons went straight over to the rebels. He fled for the third time, with all his treasure, to Tashkent, where the Russians received him well and then sent him to live at Orenburg.

His eldest son Nasreddin was proclaimed khan, allowed himself to be drawn into a war against Russia, and lost the throne.

Ferghana

The khanate was annexed — and, alone of the three, abolished.

Schuyler's own phrase for what replaced it is worth keeping, because of what it assumes: Kokand was annexed to Russia under the historic name of Ferghana. The dynasty was removed, the title extinguished, and the province given the name the Greeks and the Chinese had used for the valley two thousand years before the Ming tribe arrived in it.

Bukhara and Khiva kept their rulers until 1920 because their rulers could still control their own subjects when the Russians came. Kokand's could not, and so there was nothing to leave standing.

What Fergana became

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

The province outlasted the khanate by a long way, and it is worth being precise about what the annexation actually changed.

The three fates

Set the three Uzbek khanates beside each other one more time.

Bukhara lost Samarkand and its river head in 1868, signed a treaty, kept its emir, its army, its courts and its taxes, and lasted until 1920. Khiva lost its capital in 1873, signed, kept its khan, and lasted until 1920. Kokand was annexed in 1876 and its dynasty ended.

The difference was not military. Kokand was the largest of the three, with three million people to Bukhara's two and a half and Khiva's far fewer, and the richest agricultural land of the lot. What it did not have was a ruler who could hold his own army together for one campaign, and an empire that acquires a territory in the middle of a civil war does not leave the civil war's losers in charge of it.

What was kept

Nearly everything else. The Russians in Turkistan governed as the Dzungars had governed the Tarim and as Bukhara was now being governed: garrisons in the important towns, the internal administration left largely alone, the local courts and the local elders in place, and the revenue collected through people who had been collecting it before.

Tashkent, taken from Kokand in 1865, became the capital of Russian Turkistan, which is what it has remained. The Fergana valley became a cotton province, because irrigated land that could grow cotton was the thing the empire most wanted from Central Asia.

The last of the arrangement

It is worth noticing what ended with this khanate, because it was older than the khanate itself.

Since the Mongol conquest the political grammar of Central Asia had been the same: a nomad or tribal military class taking the revenue of an irrigated, urban, Persian-and-Turkic-speaking population, and legitimating itself by descent from Chinggis Khan or, when that failed, by piety. The Shaybanids ran it. The Janids ran it. The Manghits and Qungrats ran it without the descent. The Dzungars ran it in the Tarim. Kokand ran it in Fergana with Kirghiz and Kipchak cavalry.

In 1876 the military class was replaced by one that came from two thousand miles away, did not live on the land, and had a state behind it that could supply an army across a desert. The towns went on paying. The men who had been paid stopped being paid.

The name

Kokand's own name went off the map at the moment the khanate ended. There was no successor calling itself the khanate, no claimant, no dynasty in exile.

What there was instead was a valley, given back a name two millennia older than the state that had just been removed from it — which is as neat a statement as the nineteenth century ever made about what it thought it was doing in Asia.