Moghulistan

Better than a dog

Drafted from Dughlat, The Tarikh-i-Rashidi: A History of the Moghuls of Central Asia (1895)formation

Mirza Haydar Dughlat began his history in the 1540s because, he said, there was nobody left who remembered. At this present date, he wrote, there remains not one among them who knows these traditions, and did he not make the venture the story of the Moghul khaqans would be obliterated from the pages of the world's history.

He was writing about his own family's khans, and he starts with a boy and a dog.

The boy at Aksu

Tughluq Timur was a great-great-grandson of Chagatai, born in 730 — 1329 or 1330 — and brought out of the Kalmak country at sixteen by Amir Bulaji of the Dughlat. He was made khaqan at eighteen. What he ruled at first was Aksu and the amirs who had put him there.

At eighteen he was still a pagan, and the country he was raised over was the eastern half of a khanate that had split apart: while the western Chagatai lands turned to towns and Islam, the Moghuls — the word is simply Mongol, in a Persian mouth — kept the pastures, the herds, the tribal amirs and the old religion. Their western neighbours called them Jatah, which means brigands, and the name is used straight through the chronicles.

The Shaikh

There came to the neighbourhood of Aksu a man who had walked out of a town that was buried in sand. Shaikh Jamal al-Din had preached to the people of Katak, near Turfan, that a calamity was coming and that he had been given leave to escape it. The muezzin followed him, turned back at three farsakhs to call the evening prayer one last time, and found while he was calling that something dry like snow was falling out of the sky. When he came down the minaret door was blocked. He climbed back up, saw that it was raining sand and that the town was going under, and threw himself off the tower onto the drift.

Sometimes, Mirza Haydar adds, a wind comes and lays bare the minaret or the top of the dome; sometimes it uncovers a house, and a man who goes in finds everything in perfect order and the master of it turned to white bones.

The question

The khan had ordered a hunt and forbidden anybody to absent himself, and the shaikh and his companions were found sitting apart and dragged in as offenders. They were strangers from a ruined town, the shaikh said, who knew nothing about the hunt or the ordinances of the hunt.

The khan let the Tajik go. He was at that moment feeding his dogs with pork, and he asked, angrily:

Are you better than this dog, or is the dog better than you?

If I have faith I am better than this dog; but if I have no faith, this dog is better than I am.

The khan went away. Then he sent a man to bring the shaikh back, on the man's own horse and with all due respect. The shaikh saw that the saddle was stained with pig's blood and said he would walk; the Moghul insisted on the order; so he spread a clean handkerchief over the saddle and mounted.

He found the khan standing alone in a retired place with sorrow on his face, and the khan asked him what this thing was that made a man better than a dog. The shaikh said: faith. And explained what it was.

The khan wept, and promised that if he ever became khan with absolute authority the shaikh must come to him, and he would become a Muslim.

The shaikh died soon after. He left the charge to his son.

The morning call

When Tughluq Timur did become khan in Moghulistan, ruling in pomp and splendour, Maulana Arshad al-Din could not get an audience. So every morning he went and called the prayer near the khan's tent, until the khan sent a man to find out who kept waking him.

I am the son of the man to whom, on a certain occasion, you made the promise to become a Musulman.

The khan's answer is the sentence the whole story exists for: ever since he ascended the throne he had had it on his mind that he had made that promise, and the person he gave the pledge to never came.

He washed, declared his faith, and then the two of them decided to put the amirs to the question one at a time.

The wrestler

The first in was Amir Tulik, Mirza Haydar's own great-great-uncle, who burst into tears and said he had been converted three years earlier at Kashgar and had not dared say so. The khan rose and embraced him. So it went, one prince at a time, until Jaras refused — and offered terms. He had a man called Sataghni Buka whom he had seen lift a two-year-old camel. If the Tajik could throw him, Jaras would believe.

Everyone protested. The maulana said let it be so: if he did not throw him he would not require them to become Muslims.

A crowd assembled. The infidel came on with a conceited air and the maulana looked very small beside him. The maulana struck him full in the chest and he went down senseless, came to, raised himself, and fell at the maulana's feet uttering words of belief.

On that day, Mirza Haydar writes, a hundred and sixty thousand persons cut the hair off their heads and became Muslims, and the khan was circumcised.

Why it is the beginning

Because it is the point at which the eastern Chagatai lands become a distinct thing with a case for itself. Barak Khan and Kebek had been Muslims before, but — in the historian's judgement — neither they nor the people had known the true road, and it was Tughluq Timur's conversion that put Islam into the country and kept it there. Two years after taking the faith he crossed the Khojand river with an army and took the western half of the inheritance as well, the first khan in a generation to hold both.

He died at thirty-four, in 764. What he had built lasted about eighteen months longer.

Eighteen sons

Drafted from Dughlat, The Tarikh-i-Rashidi: A History of the Moghuls of Central Asia (1895)expansion

There were five Dughlat brothers, and the office of ulusbegi — the amir over the amirs, which their family held as of right — passed from one to the next. When Amir Bulaji died it should have gone on to his son, Khudaidad, who was seven years old.

The grievance

Qamar al-Din went down on his knees before Tughluq Timur and put the obvious case: the office should come to him, because his brother's son was seven and not fit for it. The khan would not listen, and appointed the seven-year-old.

Qamar al-Din was a violent man and could do nothing about it while the khan lived. When the khan died he revolted, and — the Moghul traditions say — put to death in a single day eighteen of Tughluq Timur's sons, and took the style of khan himself, which as a Dughlat he had no right to.

One son at the breast was hidden by Khudaidad and his mother and kept out of the reach of Qamar al-Din's searchers. That child was Khizr Khwaja, and every later khan of Moghulistan descends from him.

What it cost

Moghulistan fell into disorder and stayed there for a generation, and the disorder attracted Timur.

The Zafar-Nama, which Mirza Haydar quotes at length because he has nothing better for those years, records the expeditions by number: a third invasion of Jatah, a fourth, a fifth. Armies were sent to the Ili, to Almaty, to the Karait on the Aisha Khatun river. Timur was never content, it says, until he had carried a business through to the end, and he was not content with the peace his own amirs made. The country was raided, its amirs went over to him one by one, and Qamar al-Din was hunted through it until he disappeared.

Timur never annexed Moghulistan. He did not need to. What he did was keep it from becoming a state again for thirty years, which had the same effect while he lived and none at all afterwards.

The horseshoe nail

The khanate reassembled around the hidden child's line. Khizr Khwaja reigned, then his son Muhammad Khan, and it was under Muhammad that the conversion Tughluq Timur began was finished — by means that Mirza Haydar records with approval and without euphemism.

He was a wealthy prince and a good Muslim, and persisted in the road of justice and equity, and during his reign most of the tribes of the Moghuls became Muslims. It is well known, the historian goes on, what severe measures he used to bring them to it. If a Moghul did not wear a turban, a horseshoe nail was driven into his head. Treatment of this kind was common. May God recompense him with good.

Amir Khudaidad, the child whose appointment caused the whole catastrophe, lived long enough to raise six khans to the throne, and then went on pilgrimage to Mecca.

The building at Chadir Kul

Muhammad Khan built a caravanserai on the northern side of the Chadir Kul defile, out of stones so large that Mirza Haydar thought them wonderful until he saw the temples of Kashmir. An entrance hall twenty gaz high; a passage thirty gaz long on the right; a dome of about twenty gaz, beautifully proportioned, with a gallery round it and cells in the sides of it; on the west a mosque fifteen gaz high with more than twenty doors; solid blocks of stone over every door.

It stood on the pass road at about eleven thousand feet. A khanate remembered mostly for raids put up a stone building in the high Tian Shan for travellers to sleep in, and the man who described it had stayed there.

The khan who had nothing to give

Drafted from Dughlat, The Tarikh-i-Rashidi: A History of the Moghuls of Central Asia (1895)peak

Yunus Khan was the greatest of all the Chagatai khans, his great-grandson-in-law's cousin says, and before him there was in many respects no one like him in his family. He is also the one whose life shows most clearly what was wrong with the khanship he held.

A Timurid education

None of the Chagatai khans before him had passed the age of forty; most never reached it. Yunus lived to seventy-four.

He spent much of his youth away — twelve years studying under Sharaf al-Din Ali Yazdi, the historian of Timur whose Zafar-Nama Mirza Haydar quotes for the century he cannot otherwise cover — and travelled widely. He read the Qur'an. He excelled in penmanship and painting, was trained in singing and instrumental music, had an even temper and charming conversation and a quick perception, and was unequalled in archery.

He was, in short, a cultivated Persianate prince who happened to be the lawful khan of a nation of horsemen in the mountains, and the two halves did not fit easily together.

The gift

His first attempt on Kashgar failed. Esen Buqa came from the Yulduz with sixty thousand men and reached Kashgar in eleven days — so fast that only six thousand had caught up with him — joined the old Amir Sayyid Ali with thirty thousand more, and beat Yunus three farsakhs outside the town. The khan's wives and children were captured, including his eldest daughter, who was still at the breast; they were given what they needed and sent on after him.

He got back to Moghulistan and his followers left him. Unable to remain, he went to Khurasan to present himself to the Timurid Sultan Abu Sa'id — and was so destitute that he could find nothing to offer as a present.

So he said to Buyan Quli, one of his most devoted servants, that he was going to give him to the Mirza as a slave, by way of a gift. The man made no objection. The khan handed him over, and then asked Abu Sa'id for a district to hold, so that he might inspire the Moghuls with confidence, and was given Yatikand on the edge of Andijan.

When the time came to leave, Buyan Quli began to weep. The Mirza asked why; he told the story; the Mirza took pity on him, gave him a horse and provisions, and sent him back with his master.

What the story is about

A Chinggisid khan of the senior eastern line arriving at a Timurid court with nothing to present but a man, and going home with a Timurid district to rule so that his own people would take him seriously.

This is what the khanship had become in the eastern half. The amirs had fortified themselves wherever they happened to be and had been acting independently so long that when they came in to Yunus they did not fulfil their duties or offer him fitting allegiance, and he humoured them in every way possible. The khan was necessary and powerless: a Chinggisid was required, and no Chinggisid could command.

What he left

He acquired Tashkent in the end, and made peace among the Timurid sultans, and died old. His descendants are the point.

Of his seven children, one daughter married the Timurid Umar Shaikh Mirza and bore a son whom Mirza Haydar describes as having illumined the world with the radiance of his power. That was Babur. Another daughter was Mirza Haydar's own mother. Yunus's two sons, Mahmud and Ahmad, divided the inheritance between them, and from Ahmad came Sultan Said Khan, who took Kashgar, and Mansur, who took Turfan.

Every thread in the last century of this khanate — and a good part of the first century of the Mughal empire in India — runs back through the old man who had to give away his servant.

Two armies in happiness

Drafted from Dughlat, The Tarikh-i-Rashidi: A History of the Moghuls of Central Asia (1895)peak

In Rajab of the year 920 — the late summer of 1514 — Sultan Said Khan took the Kashgar country, and the khanate acquired the thing it had never had.

The conquest

Mirza Aba Bakr was a Dughlat who had made himself ruler of Kashgar, Yarkand and Khotan and held them for decades; Mirza Haydar, whose own family he had ruined, devotes a chapter to his evil deeds and wicked ways. Sultan Said came over the mountains with a small force, drove Aba Bakr's people inside the walls of Kashgar, and besieged Yangi Hisar for three months until the inhabitants capitulated.

When that news reached Kashgar its garrison simply abandoned the town. The fugitives joined Aba Bakr at Yarkand and he resolved on flight too, and took the road to Khotan with the khan's troops after him as far as the mountains of Tibet. Cloth, goods, cattle and horses in great quantity fell to the Moghul army; the flocks of sheep collected at the conquest, Mirza Haydar says elsewhere, were beyond counting.

The khanate now had oasis cities, irrigated land, a land revenue, caravan tolls and a capital at Yarkand.

The brother

It also had a rival. Sultan Said's elder brother Mansur held Turfan and the eastern end of the country, and there was old enmity between them — Mansur had beaten him in Moghulistan and driven him into exile.

When his younger brother Aiman Khwaja came from Turfan and urged the amirs to finish Mansur off, arguing that his power was in decline, Sultan Said refused:

He is the elder brother; in former times I did not pay him due respect, and consequently he punished me. I ought on this account to bear him no enmity.

He sent ambassadors with words of peace and submission instead. Mansur, whose soul, in the historian's phrase, had come to his lips from fear and foreboding, received new life and joy without bounds, and came in fear and trembling to a meeting between Aksu and Kusan. Sultan Said showed him great honour and agreed to read the Friday sermon and strike his coins in his brother's name — the formal marks of subordination, conceded by the stronger party.

What it bought

Security on a scale nobody in that country remembered. Any man could travel alone between Hami or China and Farghana without provisions and without fear of molestation.

Somebody made a chronogram of it — du lashkar ba nishat, two armies in happiness — which adds up to 922.

The cost, which nobody saw yet

The khanate now had two capitals, both south of the mountains, and the thing it was named for lay to the north.

Moghulistan was pasture: the Ili, the Chu, the Yulduz, Kochkar, At-Bashi, Issyk Kul. It was where the Moghuls' herds were and where their amirs' power came from, and from 1514 onward it was the poorer half of the state and the harder to defend.

Sultan Said went back into it in 1522 with his son Rashid and subdued it and the Kirghiz with it. He was there because it was his, not because he needed it. That distinction turned out to matter.

The sheep army

Drafted from Dughlat, The Tarikh-i-Rashidi: A History of the Moghuls of Central Asia (1895)contraction

Mirza Haydar rode on the campaign that lost Moghulistan, and his account of it is one long anticlimax, which is exactly why it is worth reading. Nothing was decided in a battle. The country simply filled up with other people.

The arrival

In 928 — 1522 — the khan took Rashid Sultan into Moghulistan and subdued the whole of it and the Kirghiz, and many of its people attached themselves to the young prince. Then the Kazakhs arrived.

Beaten out of the Kipchak steppe by the Manghit and no longer able to remain there, they came over into Moghulistan two hundred thousand strong. Mirza Haydar gives the consequence in six words: it was impossible to resist them. Rashid Sultan withdrew to Kashgar.

The winter

Rashid came back and wintered at Kochkar. Then Tahir Khan of the Kazakhs, pushed out of Uzbekistan, came and settled near Kochkar, and half the Kirghiz went over to him and were taken under his protection. Rashid took fright and fled in the depth of winter to At-Bashi; his father came at the end of the same winter to join him there, and the followers were reassured.

In the spring the Uzbeks pushed into the eastern quarter of the country. The remaining Kirghiz wanted to join the ones who had gone. Mirza Haydar was sent with Rashid to drive them out of Bumghal and Kochkar back to At-Bashi, and then left behind in Moghulistan to ensure law and order among the inhabitants; the khan went down to Kashgar to gather the people and see whether any agreement could be made with the Uzbeks; Mirza Haydar was sent to Yarkand to fetch the khan's elder kinswoman Sultan Nigar Khanim up into the mountains to mediate.

A khanate reduced to shuttling princesses across a range to negotiate about its own pastures.

The expedition that found nothing

Word came that the Kirghiz had separated from the Uzbeks, so the khan set off to subdue them and covered forty days' march in twelve. Mirza Haydar went ahead with five thousand men.

They reached the camp at Arish Lar and found the tents standing and everybody gone. Arms and baggage were tumbled about. Further on there were dead bodies, horses killed or wounded by arrows, broken arrows everywhere. They found a man who was half dead, and learned from him that somebody else had got there first: Babajak Sultan had come from Kusan, fought the Kirghiz three days earlier and been beaten, and the Kirghiz had sent their families off to the Uzbeks and gone after him.

Advancing further the army came on about a hundred thousand Kirghiz sheep and drove them along. Since the Kirghiz had united with the Uzbeks there was no more to be done, so they turned round and went back.

The campaign was given a name. They called it Kul Jariki — the sheep army.

The removal

Then the Moghuls put the case to the khan themselves. The Kirghiz had joined the Uzbeks; the Uzbeks meant to settle in Moghulistan; he had not the strength to match their numbers; it would be dangerous to stay in the country that winter.

So Sultan Said Khan brought Rashid Sultan and all the Moghuls of Moghulistan down to Kashgar. News came there that the Uzbeks had been routed after all, but by then it was the end of spring and difficult to go back, so they stayed. In the meanwhile Tahir Khan carried off the Kirghiz left at At-Bashi and the horse-herds the Moghuls had left behind.

Mirza Haydar's uncle had warned the khan years earlier against sending a prince to live up there, because the Moghuls had an unbounded love for Moghulistan and would all follow him. The problem in the end was the reverse of the one he foresaw. The khan went up, found he could not hold it, and brought them all down — and the love was not enough to take them back.

The air of Tibet

Drafted from Dughlat, The Tarikh-i-Rashidi: A History of the Moghuls of Central Asia (1895)end

Sultan Said Khan died on the way home from the highest campaign anybody in his family had attempted, of something the Moghuls called dam-giri — the seizing of the breath.

The expedition

Having lost the pastures, he went the other way, into the mountains south of his new country. Mirza Haydar was sent ahead into Tibet and Kashmir and conducted the business: peace was made with the kings of Kashmir, the daughter of Muhammad Shah was married to Iskandar Sultan, and the Friday sermon and the coinage in Kashmir were put in the khan's name. All the wealth of Kashmir that could be collected was brought up to him in Tibet the following spring.

He sent Mirza Haydar on further east, towards Lhasa, and turned back for Kashgar himself.

The illness

He had arrived already weak and much reduced from dam-giri and never quite recovered during the whole time he was up there. He had to make the journey home regardless. When he reached a place where dam-giri was prevalent, his pious soul took flight to the regions of the blessed.

That was at the close of the year 939 — the end of 1533. He was nearly forty-eight.

Mirza Haydar's portrait of him is affectionate and specific in a way the rest of the book is not. His conversation was graceful and eloquent in both Turki and Persian; he was always gay, open-hearted, generous; when he was about to show somebody a favour he used to blush before he spoke. A man called Maqsud Ali had once put an arrow into his left shoulder in a battle and the wound troubled him for two years and nearly killed him, and when Maqsud Ali was captured during that time the khan let him go.

What ended

Not the dynasty. Abd al-Rashid, his son, took the throne, and Mirza Haydar was still calling him the most excellent son of Sultan Said Khan in 953.

What ended was Moghulistan. The khanate kept the name and stopped having the place: its herds, its mountain pastures, its summer camps at Yulduz and Kochkar and At-Bashi, the ground from which every Moghul amir's power had come since Tughluq Timur was raised at Aksu. From the 1530s the state was Kashgar, Yarkand and Khotan — walled towns, irrigated fields, a land tax and a garrison.

There was no battle. There was a migration of two hundred thousand Kazakhs into pastures nobody could defend, a bad winter, a campaign that captured a hundred thousand sheep and no enemy, and a decision taken in Kashgar not to go back up that year.

Both halves of the Chagatai inheritance ended in the same way in the end. The western half became a country of towns and lost its khans to the amirs who ran them. The eastern half held out for two centuries longer, and then became a country of towns.

A book written in Kashmir

Drafted from Dughlat, The Tarikh-i-Rashidi: A History of the Moghuls of Central Asia (1895)afterlife

Almost everything known about the Moghul khans comes from one man, writing far from home about relatives who had turned on him, and he says so on the first page.

Who he was

Muhammad Haydar Mirza was a Dughlat — the family that held the office of ulusbegi, that raised Tughluq Timur to the khanate and six khans after him, and that ruled Kashgar in its own right for generations. His mother was a daughter of Yunus Khan. That made him first cousin to Babur on one side and cousin to the khans of Kashgar on the other.

Orphaned at sixteen, he went to Sultan Said Khan's court and was treated with fatherly kindness and so much favour that he became an object of envy. He served the khan for the rest of his life, fought his campaigns, escorted his princesses, went to Tibet for him and was at Lhasa when he died.

Then Abd al-Rashid came to the throne and destroyed the Dughlats. Mirza Haydar's own summary, in the preface, is four words longer than it needs to be and all the more pointed for it:

I thank God that He has, in His graciousness, made me absolutely independent of the Moghuls. For though the Khakans of that tribe are of my own race, nay, are my own cousins, I received very bad treatment at their hands.

Where he ended

In Kashmir, ruling it. The country he had helped negotiate a marriage alliance with in the khan's last campaign became, a few years later, his own; he governed it in the name of a Mughal emperor and wrote the Tarikh-i-Rashidi there in 951 to 953 — 1544 to 1546.

He dedicated it to Abd al-Rashid. That is where the title comes from: partly from Maulana Arshad al-Din who converted Tughluq Timur, partly from the rushd or true road that the Moghuls came to know through him, and partly, he says, because Abd al-Rashid, the last of the Moghul khaqans, is reigning, and this book has been dedicated to and written for him.

A man dispossessed by a prince, writing the history of that prince's house, in the prince's name, from a kingdom he took for himself two thousand kilometres away.

What the book is

It is two books bound together. Part I runs from Tughluq Timur to the present and is compiled, for the early reigns, from oral tradition and such contemporary accounts as did not contradict each other — conflicting traditions omitted, he says, on account of their probable inaccuracy. For the century he could not reach he transcribes Yazdi's Zafar-Nama and says so. Part II is his own life and what he saw.

He is therefore both the only narrative source for this khanate and a participant in its last thirty years, which is a combination to read carefully. He is a Dughlat writing about khans, and the Dughlats come out of it well. He is a pious man writing about a conversion, and the conversion comes with a wrestling match and a buried city.

He is also, on the evidence of the sheep army and the servant given away as a present, a man who did not tidy up. The best argument for trusting him is how often he records things that make his own side look small.

What became of the name

The khanate at Yarkand outlasted him by a century and a half, ruling the southern Tarim until the Dzungars came down and took it. The steppe kept the name longest: Moghulistan stayed on maps of the Tian Shan after the Moghuls had all gone south, which is the usual fate of a country named for people who left.