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The Khwārazm Shāhs

Pre-Islamic times to the seventh/thirteenth century

Khwārazm

1. The Afrīghids of Kāth (pre-Islamic times to 385/995)

Sixteen Shāhs are listed by al-Bīrūnī, the tenth, Arthamūkh b. Būzkār, being allegedly a contemporary of the Prophet Muḥammad. The first Shāh with an Islamic name is the seventeenth:

‘Abdallāh b. T.r.k.s.bātha, ? early third/ninth century

Mansūr b. ‘Abdallāh

‘Iraq b. Manṣūr, reigning in 285/898

Muḥammad b. ‘Irāq, reigning in 309/921

‘Abdallāh b. Ashkam, not listed by al-Bīrūnī but ruling c. 332/c. 944

⊘ Aḥmad b. Muḥammad, Abū Sa‘īd, ruling in 356/967

⊘ Muḥammad b. Aḥmad, Abū ‘Abdallāh, d. 385/995

Ma’mūnid conquest

2. The Ma’mūnids of Gurgānj (385–408/995–1017)

3. The Ghaznawid governors with the title of Khwārazm Shāh

(408–32/1017–41)

4. The line of Anūshtigin Shiḥna, originally as governors for the Seljuqs with the title of Khwārazm Shāh, from towards the mid-twelfth century often in practice largely independent rulers in Khwārazm and, at times, in Transoxania and Persia (c. 470–628/c. 1077–1231)

Khwārazm, the classical Chorasmia, was the well-irrigated, rich agricultural region on the lower Oxus, in later times the Khanate of Khiva. Surrounded as it was on all sides by steppeland and desert, it was isolated geographically, and this isolation long enabled it to maintain a separate political existence and a distinctive Iranian language and culture. Khwārazm may well have been an early home of the Iranians; certainly, the local historian and antiquary al-Bīrūnī (d. 440/1048) traced the beginnings of political life there beyond the first millennium BC. He placed the beginning of the Iranian Afrīghid dynasty in c. AD 305, and listed twenty-two Shāhs of this line down to its extinction in 385/995. Khwārazm first came into the purview of Islamic history in 93/712, when the Arab governor of Khurasan, Qutayba b. Muslim, invaded Khwārazm and wrought considerable destruction, it is reported, to the indigenous civilisation there. It thus came vaguely under Muslim suzerainty, but it was not until the end of the eighth century or the beginning of the ninth century that an Afrīghid was first converted to the new faith, appearing with the traditional convert’s name of ‘Abdallāh. The Islamic names of subsequent Shāhs are henceforth attested, though not their exact chronology, since al-Bīrūnī provides no dates.

In the course of the tenth century, the city of Gurgānj on the left bank of the Oxus grew in economic and political importance, largely because of its position as the terminus for the caravan trade across the steppes to the Volga and Russia. A local family, the Ma’mūnids, in 385/995 violently overthrew the Afrighids of Kāth (which lay on the right bank of the river), and themselves assumed the traditional title of Khwārazm Shāh. The rule of the Ma’mūnids was brief but quite glorious; great scholars like the philosopher and scientist Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna) and the littérateur al-Tha‘ālibí flourished under their patronage. Khwārazm had been theoretically under Sāmānid suzerainty, although in practice this had meant little; but in 408/1017, Maḥmūd of Ghazna, heir to the Sāmānids’ power in Khurasan, resolved to add Khwārazm to his empire, and Ma’mūnid rule was ended there. For the next decade or so, the province was governed by Ghaznawid military commanders, and then fell into the hands of Shāh Malik, the Oghuz Turkish Yabghu or ruler of Jand at the mouth of the Syr Darya. However, very soon, in 432/1041, Shāh Malik was overthrown by his rivals from the Seljuq family of the Oghuz (see below, no. 91, 1), and soon afterwards Khwārazm passed under Seljuq control.

The Great Seljuq sultans appointed their own governors to Khwārazm, and in Malik Shah’s reign his Turkish slave commander Anūshtigin Gharcha’ī, who was keeper of the royal washing-bowls (ṭasht-dār) received the nominal title of Khwārazm Shāh, although he never seems to have gone there. His successors, however, became hereditary governors in Khwārazm, with the practical title of Shāh; this line of Anūshtigin was strongly Turkish in ethos, seen by the prevalence among them of Turkish names, and close connections, including by means of marriage alliances, were kept up with the Inner Asian steppes. Anūshtigin’s grandson Atsïz, while remaining nominally a vassal of the sultans, had ambitions of striking out on a more independent policy. This became possible after Sanjar’s disastrous defeat of 535/1141 by the Qara Khitay (see below, no. 90), but the Shāhs were in turn forced to acknowledge the suzerainty of these new invaders from the Far East. In effect, the Qara Khitay left the Shāhs largely to themselves, and the last decades of the twelfth century were taken up with a prolonged struggle for hegemony in Khurasan and the whole of the Iranian East between the Shāhs and the Ghūrids of Afghanistan (see below, no. 159). By the opening years of the thirteenth century, the Shāhs were triumphant, and were able to expand right across Persia, clearing away from there the last remnants of Great Seljuq rule and even daring to confront the ‘Abbāsid caliphs in Baghdad. They thus became masters of an empire stretching from the borders of India to those of Anatolia. Yet this impressive achievement proved transitory. In 617/1220, Chingiz Khān’s Mongols conquered Transoxania, and the reign of the last Khwārazm Shāh, Jalāl al-Dīn, was spent in heroic but futile attempts to stem the Mongol influx into the Middle East.

In subsequent centuries, Khwārazm came under the rule of various Turco-Mongol and Turkish Central Asian steppe peoples, and its original Iranian character was completely overlaid, although the prestigious title of Khwārazm Shāh seems to have been borne by the governors there for the Tīmūrids as late as the fifteenth century.

Justi, 428; Lane-Poole, 176–8 (the Anūshtiginids only); Sachau, 12no. 17 (the Ma’mūnids); Zambaur, 208–9; Album, 38–9.

E. Sachau, ‘Zur Geschichte und Chronologie von Khwârazm’, SBWAW, 73 (1873), 471–506; 74 (1873), 285–330 (includes a list of the Afrīghids as given by al-Bīrūnī).

W. Barthold, Turkestan down to the Mongol Invasion, 3rd edn, 144–55,185,275–9,323ff.

İbrāhīm Kafesoğlu, Harezmşahlar devleti tarihi (485–617/1092–1229), Ankara 1956 (on the Anūshtiginids).

C. E. Bosworth, in The Cambridge History of Iran, V, 140ff., 181ff., 185–95 (on the Anūshtiginids).

L. Richter-Bernburg, ‘Zur Titulatur der HḪwārezm-Šāhe aus der Dynastie Anūsštegins’, AMI, N.F., 9(1976), 179–205.