83

The Sāmānids

204–395/819–1005

Transoxania and Khurasan

The founder of the Sāmānid line was one Sāmān Khudā, a dihqān or local landowner in the Balkh district of what is now northern Afghanistan, although the dynasty later claimed descent from the pre-Islamic Sāsānid emperors of Persia. Sāmān Khudā became a Muslim, and his four grandsons served the ‘Abbāsid caliph al-Ma’mūn as sub-governors for the Tāhirids of Khurasan (see above, no. 82, 1): Nūḥ was appointed governor of Samarkand (Samarqand), Aḥmad of Farghāna, Yahyā of Shāsh (the later Tashkent) and Ilyās of Herat (Harāt). The branch south of the Oxus did not prosper, but the others acquired a good foothold in Transoxania so that in 263/875 Naṣr b. Aḥmad received from al-Mu’tamid the governorship of that complete province. This rich region became the core of the Sāmānids’ empire, and they took over also the duties of defending Transoxania’s territorial integrity and its commercial interests from attack by the pagan Turks of the steppes. The northern fringes of Transoxania and Farghāna were definitely secured for Islam, and expeditions mounted into the steppes against the Qarluq and other Turkish tribes. By making their military might feared within the steppes and by keeping caravan routes across Inner Asia open, the Sāmānids assured the economic well-being of their lands; it was through their agency that many of the Turkish slaves, employed from the ninth century onwards very extensively in the armies of Muslim princes of the central and eastern lands, were imported. Backed by this prosperity, the Amīrs made their court at Bukhara not only a centre of Arabic learning but also of the renaissance of New Persian language and literature, and it was under Sāmānid rule that Firdawsī began his poetic version of the Persian national epic, the Shāh-nāma. In 287/900, Ismā‘īl b. Aḥmad earned the caliph’s gratitude by defeating and capturing the Ṣaffārid ‘Amr b. al-Layth (see below, no. 84, 1), and was rewarded with the governorship of Khurasan in succession to the Ṭáhirids and Ṣaffārids. The Sāmānids were now the greatest power in the east, strong proponents of Sunnī orthodoxy there, and exercising suzerainty over outlying regions like Khwārazm, the upper Oxus lands and Sistan, while in northern Persia they were rivals of the Būyids (see above, no. 75), But in the middle years of the tenth century, ominous signs of instability appeared in the Sāmānid state. A series of palace revolutions showed that the military classes, opposed to the Amīrs’ policies of centralisation, were gaining control, while revolts in Khurasan abstracted that province from the direct authority of Bukhara. It was therefore not difficult for the Turkish Qarakhanids and Ghaznawids (see below, nos 90, 158) to take over the Sāmānid territories, and the last fugitive Sāmānid, Ismā‘īl al-Muntasir, was killed in 395/1005. The downfall of the dynasty meant that all the hitherto Iranian lands north of the Oxus passed under Turkish control, and there now began there a process of ethnic and linguistic Turkification, substantially completed – except in what is now the Tajikistan Republic and to a lesser extent in Uzbekistan – by modern times.

Justi, 440; Lane-Poole, 131–3; Zambaur, 202–3; Album, 33.

EI² ‘Sāmānids’ (C. E. Bosworth).

W. Barthold, Turkestan down to the Mongol Invasion, 3rd edn, London 1968.

R. N. Frye, ‘The Sāmānids’, in The Cambridge History of Iran, IV, 136–61.

W. L. Treadwell, The Political History of the Sāmānid State, D.Phil, thesis, Oxford 1991, unpubl.