10
C. Edmund Bosworth
Ghūr is a highly mountainous and inaccessible region of what is now central Afghanistan, the name surviving in the Ghūr or Ghōrāt province of contemporary Afghanistan.1 The lack of knowledge about it in the outside world is seen in the fact that, although European travellers had been exploring and writing about Afghanistan since the first half of the nineteenth century, there was a dearth, if not a near total absence, of first-hand knowledge of Ghūr. The minaret at Jām in the upper Hari Rud valley, built by the Ghurid sultan Ghiyāth al-Dīn Muḥammad b. Sām in 570/1174–5, very probably at or near the site of the Ghurid dynasty’s summer capital, Fīrūzkūh, is one of the great monuments of medieval eastern Islamic architecture. Robert Hillenbrand suggests that it seems to be, for its time, the loftiest minaret ever built, towering 213 feet/65 metres above the river bank.2 Yet its existence was only sketchily known to British officials of the 1880s Afghan Boundary Commission and only summarily recorded by more recent local Afghan historians and archaeologists. It was not until 1957 that the French archaeologist André Maricq described in in detail, thereby making it fully known to the Western scholarly world.3
Medieval Islamic writers had been equally uninterested in Ghūr before the Ghurids burst on the wider eastern Islamic scene in the sixth/twelfth century, for it had not produced any Muslim scholar or religious figure of even minor significance. Nor had the Islamic geographers shown much interest in elucidating its topography; since it had no significant urban centres and no important trade routes crossed it, there was no impetus for the careful enumeration of roads and staging posts, vital for such travelling groups as merchants and diplomatic envoys, which was characteristic of early Muslim ‘road book’ geographical literature. Indeed, Ghūr remained an enclave of paganism – but of what this paganism consisted is wholly unknown to us -- intermittently raided during the Abbasid period by Muslim powers outside its borders in order to collect captives for the slave markets of Herat and Sistan. It was only the campaigns into Ghūr of Maḥmūd and Masʻūd of Ghazna in the first half of the fifth/eleventh century that brought local Ghūrī chiefs loosely into the orbit of the Ghaznavid empire.4 We can certainly discount the attempts of later historians and eulogists of the Ghurid dynasty, such as Jūzjānī and Fakhr al-Dīn Mubārakshāh, to give the petty, infidel warlords of Ghūr both a connection with the heroic Iranian pre-Islamic age and also a glorious Islamic past. Thus Jūzjānī was to record that the eponymous ancestor of the Ghurids, Shansab, received Islam and formal investiture of his lands at the hands of the Caliph ‘Alī, that a member of the family assisted Abū Muslim in the Abbasid Revolution and that the family was invested with the permanent rulership (imārat) of Ghūr by Hārūn al-Rashīd. Jūzjānī had already traced the family’s origins to the tyrant of Iranian mythology, Azhd Zahāk, whose family was said to have established itself in the fastnesses of Ghūr after Zahāk’s thousand-year dominion was overthrown by Farīdūn. These are clearly myths of a familiar type cultivated by the apologists and publicists for newly-established, parvenu powers.5
Recent travellers in Ghūr have noted how the countryside bristles with the ruins of fortresses and towers.6 The Shansabānīs must have been just one line of many petty chiefs in Ghūr, each with its own, well-defended power base. Indications in the Ghaznavid historian Abū l-Faḍl Bayhaqī and in Jūzjānī’s Ṭabaqāt-i Nāṣirī show that the Shansabānīs’ centre of power was in the district of Warshāda in the region of the upper reaches of the Hari Rud; it was here that the capital, Fīrūzkūh, of what became the main branch of the family, was to be established. The anonymous author of the Ḥudud al-‘ālam, writing in northern Afghanistan towards the end of the fourth/tenth century, states that the ruler of Ghūr (but it is highly improbable that the region was under a unified authority at that time) was a vassal of the amir of Gūzgān, i.e. of the Farīghūnids, the author’s own patrons.7
In the fifth/eleventh century, the sultans in Ghazna must have exercised only a vague suzerainty over Ghūr, and during this time the Shansabānīs were apparently attempting to extend their authority over other local lords; at one point in the later years of the century, records Jūzjānī, these chiefs appealed to the Ghaznavid sultan Ibrāhīm b. Mas‘ūd that he should intervene and curb Shansabānī aggressiveness, causing Ibrāhīm to march into Ghūr against the Shansabānīs.8 But from the early sixth/twelfth century onwards, Ghaznavid influence in Ghūr was giving place to that of the Great Seljuqs on the eastern Islamic fringes, seen especially in Sanjar’s successful intervention at Ghazna in the succession dispute of Mas‘ūd III b. Ibrāhīm’s sons after that sultan’s death in 508/1115 and the Seljuq’s placing of Bahrām Shāh on the throne of Ghazna as his tributary. Already in 501/1107–8 Sanjar had raided into Ghūr from Khurasan, and the Shansabānī chief ‘Izz al-Dīn Ḥusayn b. Ḥasan (r. 493–540/1100–45) – whose father had considered himself powerful and exalted enough to adopt a princely honorific, that of Quṭb al-Dīn – had perforce to become Sanjar’s vassal and to forward tribute to Marw which included such specialities of Ghūr as mailed coats, products of the local iron industry of the region, and dogs of a ferocious local breed.9
Quṭb al-Dīn Hasan’s grandson ‘Alā’ al-Dīn Ḥusayn b. Sām (r. 544–56/1149–61) was the first Shansabānī ruler who felt strong enough to challenge the Ghaznavids for dominion over eastern Afghanistan. In ca. 545/1150 (the sources vary regarding the exact date) he defeated Bahrām Shāh in battle, drove him into temporary exile in India and sacked Ghazna in a frightful fashion, earning for himself the sobriquet of Jahān-sūz, ‘World Incendiary’; the spoils of Ghazna doubtless contributed subsequently to the building and ornamenting of Fīrūzkūh and the financing of the Ghurid armies.10 ‘Alā’ al-Dīn Ḥusayn’s pretensions to a more than local role now led him to imitate Ghaznavid and Seljuq practice and to style himself by the honorific of al-sulṭān al-mu‘aẓẓam , ‘Mighty sovereign’, and to adopt one of the other insignia of royalty, the chatr or ceremonial parasol.11 He was not, however, strong enough to throw off Seljuq control and to extend his power westwards from Ghur and towards Khurasan. In 547/1152 he was decisively defeated by Sanjar in the Hari Rud valley near Herat, causing him willy-nilly to divert Ghurid efforts eastwards and southwards against the last Ghaznavids. It only became possible for ‘Alā’ al-Din Husayn completely to throw off Seljuq control after Sanjar’s death in 553/1157.12
The early history within Ghūr of the Shansabānī family had been one of internecine disputes and feuding, but with the acquisition in the second half of the sixth/twelfth century of what became a vast if transient empire, they seem to have obtained a sense of responsibility and a patrimonial conception of power so that, as they expanded territorially, various members of the family established themselves in the different parts of their empire. Thus Tukhāristān, Badakhshān and Shughnān in the upper Oxus region were taken over by ‘Alā’ al-Dīn Ḥusayn after his victory over the Ghaznavids; he installed there and at Bāmiyān in 540/1145 his brother Fakhr al-Dīn Mas‘ūd, and this branch ruled there in north-eastern Afghanistan until overwhelmed by the Khwarazmians in 612/1215.13
Much more important, however, was the partnership between the two greatest members of the main branch of the Ghurid dynasty, sons of Bahā’ al-Dīn Sām: Shams al-Dīn, later also Ghiyāth al-Dīn Muḥammad (r. 558–99/1163–1203), and Shihāb al-Dīn, later also Mu‘izz al-Dīn Muḥammad (r. 569–602/1173–1206), who came to power after their cousin Sayf al-Dīn Muḥammad had been killed by the Oghuz whilst campaigning against them in the vicinity of Marw al-Rūdh in 558/1163.14 The two brothers generally maintained a mutual amity and evolved a division of spheres of authority and military expansion. Once the Turks who had seized Ghazna after the last Ghaznavids had finally and irrevocably withdrawn to their Indian possessions in the Panjab, had been ejected, Sultan Mu‘izz al-Dīn was to use Ghazna as a springboard for raids down to the plains of India, inaugurating what was to be the most lasting historical significance of the Ghurids, the definitive establishment of Islam in the northern part of the subcontinent.15 His elder brother Ghiyāth al-Dīn was to rule over the western lands of the empire from his capital Fīrūzkūh, its fortress having been founded by his uncle Quṭb al-Dīn Muḥammad.16 Ghiyāth al-Dīn’s major concern was to be expansion westward into Khurasan, aiming to enlarge his territories and to check the ambitions there of what was to become the other great Islamic power of the eastern Islamic world, the Anūshteginid Khwarazmshāhs, and it is with Ghiyāth al-Dīn’s policy there that we are now concerned.
Khurasan had fallen into near-anarchy after the demise of Seljuq authority there, with control disputed between various Turkish commanders and the Qarakhanids of Transoxiana, and with the increasing power of the Khwarazmshahs bringing a new, aggressive and expansionist force into the region; these last were to prove the main antagonists of Ghiyāth al-Dīn in his efforts to take over the region.17 His first concern was to secure one of the great cities of eastern Khurasan, Herat, downstream from Fīrūzkūh where the Hari Rud widened out into the plains. The Ghurids had briefly held Herat in 545/1150–1, invited there in the first place, so Ibn al-Athīr says, by the town notables and local people, tired of the excesses of the Turks;18 but within six or seven years the city was apparently again in the hands of Turkish warlords, doubtless connected with the Oghuz or Ghuzz who had in 549/1153 captured the Seljuq sultan Sanjar and held him a virtual prisoner almost till his death. Ghiyāth al-Dīn in 559/1164 attacked and killed the Turkish amir Tāj al-Dīn Yïldïz, who had established himself in Herat, and temporarily too over the city and its surrounding region Bādghīs. But soon afterwards we find the people of Herat seeking aid from yet another Turkish commander, the former ghulām of Sultan Sanjar, Mu’ayyid al-Dīn Ay Aba of Nishapur, who sent his troops to the city and compelled the Oghuz, who were besieging Herat, to retreat. Ay Aba assumed control there, but over the next years possession of Herat oscillated between various contenders for power.19 Ay Aba was killed by the Khwarazmshah Tekish’s troops in 569/1174,20 and two years later Ghiyāth al-Dīn was at last able to take over first Herat and then the town of Pūshang to its south; Herat was to remain under Ghurid authority for over thirty years.21 Possession of the city gave Ghiyāth al-Dīn the key to further expansion into Khurasan; and the prestige accruing to him caused the local ruler of Nīmrūz or Sistan, to the south of the Khurasanian region of Quhistān, the Naṣrid Malik Tāj al-Dīn Ḥarb (r. 564–610/1169–1213) to acknowledge the Ghurids as his suzerains. Tāj al-Dīn placed them in the khuṭba of his capital Zarang and, on various occasions, sent troop contingents for the Ghurid army, to be employed against the Khwarazmians. Even the last Seljuq amirs in distant Kirman allegedly paid homage to Ghiyāth al-Dīn.22
The inscriptions on the minaret at Jām show Ghiyāth al-Dīn with the grandiose titles al-sulṭān al-mu‘aẓẓam and al-shāhanshāh al-a‘ẓam, whilst that of qasīm Amīr al-Mu’minīn ‘Associate, Partner of the Commander of the Faithful’, which was normally acquired from a specific grant of the caliph in Baghdad,23 reflects the strongly orthodox Sunni ethos of the Ghurids. In earlier times, it seems that missionaries of the strongly pietistic sect of the Karrāmiyya may have brought the faith of Islam to Ghūr from Khurasan, where the Karrāmiyya had their origin. Ibn al-Athīr and Jūzjānī record that Ghiyāth al-Dīn and Mu‘izz al-Dīn, however, abandoned their former adherence to the Karrāmīs early in their reigns when they took over Ghazna and Khurasan, for the more orthodox Shāfi’ī or Hanafī law schools; Jūzjānī relates that a Shāfi‘ī faqīh, the Qādī Shaykh Wajīh al-Dīn Marwarrūdhī, was instrumental in this changeover, whilst Ibn al-Athīr attributes to the great Shāfi‘ī scholar Fakhr al-Dīn Rāzī a major part in the polemics involved at the Ghurid court.24
The Ghurids gave their moral support to the Abbasid caliphs al-Mustanjid, al-Mustaḍī’ and al-Nāṣir, the latter of whom, after the demise of his enemies the Great Seljuqs in 590/1194, fell out of the frying pan into the fire and was now increasingly threatened by the advance of the Khwarazmshahs across Iran as far as Rayy, Hamadan and Isfahan. High-level emissaries were frequently exchanged between Baghdad and Fīrūzkūh (the father of the historian Jūzjānī was a member of one Ghurid embassy to the seat of the caliphate). The caliph seems to have incited the Ghurids to act against the Shahs, and al-Nāṣir certainly gave the Ghurids moral support, on several occasions sending them honorific titles and robes of honour, granting them the right to a panj nawba, the fivetimes daily military band ceremonial salutation, and enrolling Ghiyāth al-Dīn in his revived and reformed futuwwa order.25 For their part, both Ghiyāth al-Dīn and Mu‘izz al-Dīn on various occasions sent expeditions into Quhistān against the Ismā‘īlī heretics, stigmatised in the sources as malāḥida, ‘deviationists’. Thus in either 597/1200–1, according to Ibn al-Athīr, or 601/1204–5, according to Jūzjānī, Mu‘izz al-Dīn or his kinsman ‘Alā’ al-Dīn Muḥammad b. Shujā‘ al-Dīn ‘Alī, led a large-scale expedition into mulḥidistān, i.e. Quhistān, capturing Qā’in and them Gūnābād, where the public worship was then performed according to Sunni practice.26
The main efforts of the Ghurids were concentrated on defending their Khurasanian conquest against the Khwarazmshahs, and we have copious information on these struggles, above all from Jūzjānī and Ibn al-Athīr, and, for the last years of the dynasty, from Juwaynī. As well as the native Ghūrī tribesmen, the armies of the sultans included Tajiks recruited from the newly-acquired territories in Khurasan; Khalaj tribesmen from south-eastern Afghanistan (whatever may have been their specific ethnicity); and Turkish ghulāms or slave guards, these last prominent amongst the sultans’ leading commanders.27
The Khwarazmshah Tekish b. Il Arslan’s elder brother and rival Sulṭān Shāh, excluded from the succession in the capital Gurgānj by his brother’s action, had fled southwards into Khurasan and thence to the Ghurid court at Fīrūzkūh. Ghiyāth al-Dīn gave him shelter there but refused to give him troops for an attempt to secure the Khwarazmian throne. Subsequently, Sulṭān Shāh became a new force in the eastern Islamic lands. He carved out for himself a principality in northern Khurasan, based on such centres as Marw, Sarakhs and Ṭūs, seeking aid from the Qara Khitai who had in the middle years of the century come from Mongolia to take over Transoxiana and to make its local rulers their tributaries.28
The Khwarazmian assembled an army in order to attack the Ghurids’ position in Herat and Bādghīs, but Ghiyāth al-Dīn summoned troops from the Naṣrids in Sistan, from the Ghurid branch in Bāmiyān and from his brother Mu‘izz al-Dīn, and in 586/1190 decisively defeated Sulṭān Shāh at Marw al-Rūdh.29 With the threat from Sulṭān Shāh thus averted and the latter’s death three years later in 589/1193, the two Ghurid brothers were able over the next few years to acquire Marw, Nishapur and Ṭūs, installing there members of the Ghurid family as governors, even penetrating as far west through Khurasan as Bisṭām (where the last of the Ghurids, ‘Alā’ al-Dīn Muḥammad b. Shujā‘ al-Dīn ‘Alī, acquired for himself a grave adjacent to the shrine of the famous mystic Abū Yazīd Bisṭāmī, and was eventually buried there).30
By Ghurid times, the great period for local histories of Nishapur had passed. Of the few surviving histories of Herat, that of Fāmī (in any case, known only fragmentarily) was written in the middle or later years of Sanjar’s reign and does not note the appearance of the Ghurids in the city, whilst the later histories, notably Sayf b. Muḥammad’s Tārīkhnāma-yi Harāt and Mu‘īn al-Dīn Zamchī Isfizārī’s Rawḍāt al-Jannāt fī Awṣāf Madīnat Harāt, concentrate more on the post-Ghurid history of the city under the Kart Maliks and the Timurids. Thus Isfizārī merely gives a succinct, uninformative account of the Ghurid dynasty and notes the burial place of Ghiyāth al-Dīn Muḥammad in the city, but has nothing of any consequence on the internal state of Herat under Ghurid rule.31
We would like to know more about the internal history of Herat and other cities at this time. The Ghurids certainly adorned Herat with at least one notable building, the mausoleum of Ghiyāth al-Dīn Muḥammad, adjacent to the congregational mosque, which it seems that the sultan had restored in 597/1201, installing there a Shāfi‘ī as Imam.32 The sultan may have begun the tomb for himself at some point before his death in 599/1203, or it may have been completed by his son Ghiyāth al-Dīn Maḥmūd. The building is no longer extant, having been demolished in the 1950s, but it has been described in detail, and copiously illustrated, from earlier accounts and photographs, by Robert Hillenbrand, who describes it as ‘a masterpiece on many accounts’.33
Juwaynī implies that Ghurid rule was far from popular in Khurasan, stating that, just before Ghiyāth al-Dīn Muḥammad’s death, his brother Mu‘izz al-Dīn, campaigning in western Khurasan against the Khwarazmshah ‘Alā’ al-Dīn Muḥammad, caused discontent amongst the people of Ṭūs because of his troops’ excesses, including the confiscation of grain of theirs stored under the protection of the Imām ‘Alī al-Riḍā’s shrine at Mashhad, making people in revulsion incline to the cause of the Khwarazmshahs.34
Against this, however, one should take into account the obvious point that in his history Juwaynī shows himself as very hostile to the Ghurids. He states that, when the news of the Shāh Tekish’s death had reached the two Ghurid brothers Ghiyāth al-Dīn and Mu‘izz al-Dīn, ‘those painters, the promptings of the demon Ambition, limned pictures of wicked and unprofitable imaginings and drawings of lewd and fruitless phantasies upon the page of their brain; and the bride-dressers known as Human Pride perfumed and painted the brides called Greed and Cupidity’ led them to advance into Khurasan.35
Juwaynī in fact shows himself as distinctly favourable – insofar as his collaborationist position vis-à-vis his Mongol masters allowed – to the Khwarazmshahs.36 Ibn al-Athīr in fact relates that when Ghiyāth al-Dīn in 597/1200–01 captured Nishapur from the Khwarazmians, he restored to their owners all the property and goods that his forces had initially plundered, and in his death notice for Ghiyāth al-Dīn the historian praises the Sulṭān for his building of Shāfi‘ī mosques and madrasas and his general justice and benevolence towards his subjects, including towards the ‘Alids.37 It is certainly true that the Ghurids brought peace to a city like Herat for something like thirty years, after it had suffered twenty years of control by incessantly changing, exploitative Turkish condottieri masters.
Another of the great cities of Khurasan, Balkh, on the northern fringes of the Ghurid empire, long eluded the sultans’ control. In 547/1152 ‘Alā’ al-Dīn Ḥusayn had briefly occupied it with help from the Oghuz, but after plundering the city and destroying many public buildings, it was the Oghuz who were to hold it for many years, initially under the leadership of Qumāch, a former ghulām of Sanjar’s and under the theoretical suzerainty of the Qarakhanid Maḥmūd Khān, Sanjar’s nephew and nominally his heir in Khurasan. Ghiyāth al-Dīn managed to kill Qumāch in battle, but Balkh passed under the authority of the Qara Khitai until in 594/1198 Bahā’ al-Dīn Sām b. Muḥammad, of the Bāmiyān branch of the Ghurids (r. 588–602/1192–1212), at last captured it definitively from a certain Turkish commander called Azyāh (?), who had paid tribute to the Qara Khitai, and incorporated it into the Ghurid empire. Yet Ghurid control over Balkh was only brief, enduring for a mere eight years until the Khwarazmshah ‘Alā’ al-Dīn Muḥammad took Tirmidh and Balkh, with the latter city to fall in turn to Chingiz Khan’s Mongols in 618/1221 and to suffer devastation on such a scale that Balkh did not revive till Timurid times.38
The Ghurid position in Khurasan gradually crumbled under the onslaught of ‘Alā’ al-Dīn Muḥammad, who succeeded his father Tekish in 596/1200. The new Shāh invaded Khurasan soon after his accession, but failed to capture Herat and was compelled to withdraw. Ghiyāth al-Dīn Muḥammad died in 599/1203. Just after this, the Khwarazmshah made a second attack on Herat but again withdrew, and later in that year 601/1204 Mu‘izz al-Dīn Muḥammad returned from India and launched an invasion of Khwarazm. His army was, however, heavily defeated at Andkhūy on the Oxus by the combined forces of ‘Alā’ al-Dīn Muḥammad and his Qara Khitai allies, and a separate Ghurid attack aimed at Marw was repelled at Sarakhs by the Shāh’s commander Chaqïr.39
Mu‘izz al-Dīn was assassinated in the Indus valley whilst returning from India in 602/1206 (possibly by Ismā‘īlī fidā’īs40) only three years after his brother Ghiyāth al-Dīn’s death. The latter’s successor in Ghūr and its dependencies, Ghiyāth al-Dīn Maḥmūd, lingered on at Fīrūzkūh from 602/1206 till his murder in 609/1212, latterly as a mere puppet ruler of the Khwarazmians, whilst Ghazna fell under the control of the Turkish commander Tāj al-Dīn Yïldïz, who had been Mu‘izz al-Dīn’s principal lieutenant. All Khurasan had by then been lost to the Ghurids, including Herat, which fell, after a prolonged thirteen months’ siege, in 605/1208–9.41
The Ghurids thus left only a temporary mark on the history of Khurasan, although after ca. 643/1245 the local Herati family of the Karts established themselves in the city for some century and a half, basing the legitimacy of their rule there on a marriage connection with a Shansabānī princess; they could thus claim to be in some degree heirs of the Ghurids. Nevertheless, the Ghurids were to have a lasting significance in the history of the Islamic East, since the sultans and their slave commander epigoni in India were to be the first Muslim power to achieve a permanent implantation of the faith in the northern part of the subcontinent.
Notes
1Cf. the map of post-1964 Afghanistan administrative divisions in Louis Dupree, Afghanistan (Princeton, 1973), p. 157.
2Robert Hillenbrand, ‘The architecture of the Ghaznavids and Ghurids’, in Carole Hillenbrand (ed), Studies in Honour of Clifford Edmund Bosworth.Vol. II: The Sultan’s Turret: Studies in Persian and Turkish Culture (Leiden, 2000), p. 157.
3Amongst a considerable literature on the subject, see the pioneer study by André Maricq and Gaston Wiet, Le minaret de Djam. La découverte de la capital des sultans ghorides (XIIe-XIIIe siècles) (Paris, 1959); Warwick Ball, ‘The towers of Ghur. A Ghurid “Maginot Line”?’, in Warwick Ball and Leonard Harrow (eds), Cairo to Kabul. Afghan and Islamic Studies Presented to Ralph Pinder-Wilson (London, 2002), p. 21; Janine Sourdel-Thomine, Le minaret ghouride de Djām. Un chef d’œuvre du XIIe siècle (Paris, 2004); David Thomas, ‘Firuzkuh. The summer capital of the Ghurids’, in Amira K. Bennison and Alison L. Gascoigne (eds), Cities in the Pre-Modern Islamic World. The Urban Impact of Religion, State and Society (London and New York, 2007), pp. 115–44; Finbar B. Flood, ‘Jam Minaret’, EIr , xiv, pp. 432–6; idem, Objects of Translation: Material Culture and Medieval ‘Hindu-Muslim’ encounter (Princeton and Oxford, 2009), pp. 96–100. The paucity of knowledge by travellers of the minaret’s existence and of traces of other buildings of the Ghurid capital in the vicinity which have now come to light (see Alison L. Gascoigne, ‘Archaeological investigations at Jam, Afghanistan’, Fondation Max Van Berchem, Geneva, Bulletin, no. 20 [December, 2006], pp. 1–3) is in part explicable by the fact that, in recent times, the route along the Heri Rud basin has made a detour out of the main river valley and along an affluent, thus bypassing the site; see Maricq and Wiet, Le minaret de Djam, pp. 13–20, 55–64. Fīrūzkūh is described as the summer capital of Sultan Ghiyāth al-Dīn Muḥammad (on whom see pp. 212–3) by the historian of the Ghurid dynasty, Jūzjānī, Ṭabaqāt-i Nāṣiri, second edition, ed. ‘Abd al-Ḥayy Ḥabībī (Kabul, 1342–3/1963–4), i, p. 367, tr. H.G. Raverty (London, 1881–99), i, p. 389, giving the garmsīr or warm region of Zamindawar in southeastern Afghanistan as his winter capital.
4C. E. Bosworth, ‘The early Islamic history of Ghūr’, Central Asiatic Journal, vi (1961), pp. 116–17, 120ff.
5Ibid, pp. 125–6, citing Jūzjānī, Ṭabaqāt, i, pp. 320–1, tr. I, pp. 302–9, and giving citations from Fakhr al-Dīn Mubārakshāh in later works; Bosworth, ‘The heritage of rulership in early Islamic Iran and the search for dynastic connections with the past’, Iran, xi (1973), pp. 52–3; K.A. Nizami, ‘The Ghurids’, in M.S. Asimov and C. E. Bosworth (eds), UNESCO History of the Civilizations of Central Asia. Vol. IV. The Age of Achievement: A.D. 750 to the End of the Fifteenth Century. Part 1. The Historical, Social and Economic Setting (Paris, 1998), pp. 178–9.
6See Ball, ‘The towers of Ghur’, pp. 21–4 (also observing, p. 41, that ‘The sheer quantity of the remains adds up to one of the most extraordinary archaeological complexes in the eastern Islamic world’), and Bruce Wannell, ‘Echoes in a landscape – western Afghanistan in 1989’, in Ball and Harrow (eds), Cairo to Kabul, pp. 236–47.
7Ḥudūd al-‘alām: ‘The Regions of the World’. A Persian Geography 372A.H.–982A.D., trans. V. Minorsky, second edition, (Cambridge, 1970), p. 110, and comm. pp. 342–4.
8Jūzjānī, Ṭabaqāt, i, p. 332, tr. Raverty, i, pp. 331–2; C. E. Bosworth, The Later Ghaznavids, Splendour and Decay. The Dynasty in Afghanistan and Northern India 1040–1186 (Edinburgh, 1977), p. 69.
9The author of the Ḥudūd al-‘ālam, written nearby (see above, n. 7), had stressed that Ghur produced armour, coats of mail and weapons; the name of the settlement of Ᾱhangarān, lit. ‘the blacksmiths’, in the upper Heri Rud valley presumably relates to the iron-working industry of Ghūr. See Bosworth, ‘The early Islamic history of Ghūr’, p. 120, and Nizami, ‘The Ghurids’, p. 178.
10Bosworth, The Later Ghaznavids, pp. 115–16.
11Ibn al-Athīr, al-Kāmil fi l-Ta’rīkh, ed. C. Tornberg (Beirut, 1385–7/1965–7), xi, p. 166, tr. D.S. Richards, The Chronicle of Ibn al-Athīr for the Crusading Period from al-Kāmil fi’l-Ta’rīkh. Part 2. The years 541–589/1146–1193: The age of Nur al-Dīn and Saladin (Farnham, 2007), p. 47, and see C. E. Bosworth, ‘The political and dynastic history of the Iranian world (A.D. 1000–1217)’, in J.A. Boyle (ed.), The Cambridge history of Iran. Vol V: The Saljuq and Mongol Periods (Cambridge, 1968), p. 161. The littérateur Niẓāmī ‘Arūḍī Samarqandī further gives his patron ‘Alā’ al-Dīn Ḥusayn the honorific Ikhtiyār Amīr al-Mu’minīn ‘The Chosen One of the Commander of the Faithful’, anticipating the Qasīm Amīr al-Mu’minīn of his nephew Ghiyāth al-Dīn Muḥammad, see above, p. 213.
12Wiet, ‘Commentaire historique’, in Maricq and Wiet, Le minaret de Djam, pp. 31–54; Bosworth, ‘The political and dynastic history of the Iranian world (A.D. 1100–1217)’, p. 160; Bosworth, The Later Ghaznavids, pp. 115–19; Bosworth, ‘Ghurids’ EIr, x, pp. 588–9.
13Jūzjānī, Ṭabaqāt, i, pp. 384–92, tr. Raverty, i, pp. 421–37; Wiet, ‘Commentaire historique’, in Maricq and Wiet, Le minaret de Djam, pp. 35–6; Nizami, ‘The Ghurids’, p. 184.
14Jūzjānī, Ṭabaqāt, i, pp. 352–3, tr. Raverty, i, pp. 367–8; Ibn al-Athīr, al-Kamil, xi, pp. 293–4, tr. Richards, pp. 140–1.
15See André Wink, Al-Hind. The Making of the Islamic World. Vol. II. The Slave Kings and the Islamic Conquest 11th-13th Centuries (Leiden, 1997), pp. 135–46; Peter Jackson, The Delhi Sultanate. A Political and Military History (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 7–22.
16See Wiet, ‘Commentaire historique’, in Maricq and Wiet, Le minaret de Djam, pp. 38–9, and concerning Firuzkuh, above, n. 3.
17See Ibrahim Kafesoglu, Harezmsahlar Devleti Tarihi (485–617/1092–1229) (Ankara, 1956), pp. 147–55; Bosworth, ‘Khwarazm-Shahs’, EI2, v, p. 1067.
18Ibn al-Athīr, al-Kāmil, xi, p. 151, tr. Richards, Part 2, p. 37.
19Cf. Jürgen Paul, ‘The histories of Herat’, Iranian Studies xxxiii (2000), pp. 112–13.
20W. Barthold, Turkestan Down to the Mongol Invasion (London, 1928), pp. 337–8, citing Ibn al-Athīr and Juwaynī.
21Ibn al-Athīr inserts in his chronicle, at al-Kāmil, xi, pp. 170–1, tr. Richards, Part 2, p. 52, the definitive occupation of Herat under the year 547/1152–3, but states that he has telescoped various events together to make a continuous narrative.
22Jūzjānī, Ṭabaqāt, i, pp. 58, tr. Raverty, i, pp. 337–8; Wiet, ‘Commentaire historique’, in Maricq and Wiet, Le minaret de Djam, p. 39; C. E. Bosworth, The History of the Saffarids of Sistan and the Maliks of Nimruz (247/861 to 949/1542–3) (Costa Mesa and New York, 1994), pp. 399–401.
23Cf. Sourdel-Thomine, Le minaret ghouride de Jām, pp. 130–1.
24Ibn al-Athīr, al-Kāmil, xii, pp. 151–2, 154, tr. D.S. Richards, The chronicle of Ibn al-Athīr for the Crusading period from al-Kāmil fi’l-Ta’rīkh. Part 3. The years 589–629/1193– 1231: The Ayyubids after Saladin and the Mongol menace (Farnham, 2007), pp. 46–7, 48; Jūzjānī, Ṭabaqāt, i, pp. 362–4, tr. Raverty, i, pp. 384–5; Wiet, ‘Commentaire historique’, in Maricq and Wiet, Le minaret de Djam, pp. 49–50; Bosworth, ‘The early Islamic history of Ghūr’, pp. 129–31.
25Jūzjānī, Ṭabaqāt, i, p. 361, tr. Raverty, i, pp. 382–3; Angelika Hartmann, an-Nāṣir li-Dīn Allāh (1180–1225). Politik, Religion, Kultur in der späten ‘Abbasidenzeit (Berlin and New York, 1975), pp. 98ff., 265–6, and 293 (list of envoys from al-Nāṣir to the Ghurids); Mohsen Zaker, ‘Javānmardi’, EIr, xiv, pp. 596–7.
26Farhad Daftary, The Isma‘ilis, their history and doctrines (Cambridge, 1996), p. 404; C. Edmund Bosworth, ‘The Isma‘ilis of Quhistān and the Maliks of Nīmrūz or Sīstān’, in Daftary, ed., Medieval Isma‘ili history and thought (Cambridge,1996), p. 225.
27See concerning the composition of the Ghurid troops and their various roles in internal Ghurid affairs, Wiet, ‘Commentaire historique’, in Maricq and Wiet, Le minaret de Djam, pp. 45–7, and Peter Jackson, ‘The fall of the Ghurid dynasty’, in Carole Hillenbrand (ed.), Studies in Honour of Clifford Edmund Bosworth. Vol. II. The Sultan’s Turret (Leiden, 2000), pp. 210–11, 230–1.
28See C. E. Bosworth, ‘Ḳara Ḵẖitay’, EI2, iv, pp. 580–2; Michal Biran, The Empire of the Qara Khitai in Eurasian History. Between China and the Islamic world (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 41ff.
29For all these events, essentially recorded by Jūzjānī and Ibn al-Athīr, see Barthold, Turkestan Down to the Mongol Invasion, pp. 337ff.; Bosworth, ‘The political and dynastic history of the Iranian world (A.D. 1000–1217)’, pp. 188–92.
30Jūzjānī, Ṭabaqāt, i, p. 383, tr . Raverty, i, pp. 419–20.
31Rawḍāt al-Jannāt, ed. Sayyid Muḥammad Kāẓim Imām (Tehran, 1338/1959), i, pp. 393–400; cf. Paul, ‘The Histories of Herat’, pp. 98–103.
32Wiet, ‘Commentaire historique’, in Maricq and Wiet, Le minaret de Djam, p. 43.
33‘The Ghurid tomb at Herat’, in Ball and Harrow (eds), Cairo to Kabul, pp. 123–43.
34Tārīkh-i Jahān-gushāy, tr. J.A. Boyle, The History of the World-Conqueror (Manchester 1958), i, pp. 318–19.
35Ibid, trans. Boyle, i, pp. 315–16.
36Above all, he is laudatory of the last of the Anushteginids, Jalāl al-Dīn Mengübirti, cf. The History of the World-Conqueror, Translator’s Introduction, i, pp. xxxi-xxxii.
37Ibn al-Athīr, xii, pp. 165–6, 181–2, tr. Richards, Part 3, pp. 57–8, 68–9.
38C. E. Bosworth, ‘Balḵ. ii. History from the Arab conquest to the Mongols’, EIr, iii, p. 590.
39See for these events, Barthold, Turkestan Down to the Mongol Invasion, p. 350–1.
40Cf. Juwaynī, tr. Boyle, The History of the World-Conqueror, i, pp. 326–7 and n. 27.
41For these last years of the dynasty, see the detailed study of Jackson, ‘The fall of the Ghurid dynasty’, pp. 207–35.
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