CHAPTER XVII
The Ghaznavides and the Rise of the Seljūks
The struggles between Mahmūd of Ghazna and Ilik Khān of Kāshghar continued till the year A.H. 401 (1010), when the latter, owing to a quarrel with his brother Toghān, was obliged to withdraw his troops, and a long period of peace ensued, with but slight interruptions, during which the Oxus continued to be regarded as the frontier of their respective realms.
Before the actual downfall of the Sāmānides the province of Khwārazm,[269] which lay between the states of the Turkish Khāns and the Ghaznavides, had become practically independent. On the final overthrow of the Sāmānides, the Khwārazm Shāh,[270] as their ruler was called, had thrown in his fortunes with the Ghaznavides. In A.H. 407 (1017) the then ruler was murdered by rebels, whereupon Mahmūd marched into the country at the head of a large force and conquered it, setting up a governor of his own creation named Altuntāsh.
Great difficulties attend an attempt to define the ethnographic affinities of the Turks. A similarity of language forces one to associate the Tartars of Southern Russia, the Turkomans of the Oxus countries, and the Uzbegs of Transoxiana. This race, in the broadest sense of the word, may be divided into three groups:—
(1) The Northern Turks, comprising the Siberian nomads, such as the Yakuts, etc.
(2) The Eastern Turks, including those of Chinese Turkestān and the Uzbegs of Russian Turkestān, to whom are related the Tartars of the Crimea and the Volga.
(3) The Western Turks, comprising the Osmānlīs, or Ottoman branch, the Āzerbāyjānīs of Persia, and the Turkomans,—in fact, what we commonly in Europe understand by the word Turk.
The habitat of the original Turks was in the Altaï, whence they migrated in large numbers at an early period towards China and Turkestān. It was in this latter direction that they met with least resistance, and thither, therefore, they wandered in the greatest numbers.
But, apart from these lesser migrations, two great Turkish waves poured, at an interval of two hundred years, over Western Asia and Southern Europe—the Seljūks and the hordes of Chingiz Khān.
The former, composed of what we now call Western Turks, of whom the Ghuz and the Turkomans were the predominant element, swept over the Oxus-lands into Armenia and Asia Minor. From them sprang, at a later date, the Osmānlīs, who finally overthrew the Byzantine Empire. A portion, however, of the Seljūks either remained in the Oxus country, or were pressed across that river by the advances of the Eastern Turks into modern Turkomania.