In 1736 Nādir Shāh of Persia, whom Vambéry styles the last of the Asiatic conquerors of the world,[461] after crushing the Ottoman power in Georgia, turned his eagle glance on the states on his north-eastern frontier. A host under his son Rizā Kulī Khān was hurled against Andakhūy and Balkh, and soon the Sun and Lion of Persia waved over both citadels. Flushed with victory, Rizā Kulī Khān crossed the Oxus and fell upon Abū-l-Fayz Khān’s dispirited legions. But Ilbars, the lion-hearted ruler of Khiva, came to the rescue, and the forces of the two Khānates gained the day in an encounter with the invaders at Karshī. Nādir Shāh, who had far deeper designs at stake, recalled his impetuous son, and informed the Khāns of Central Asia that the expedition had been undertaken without his consent, and that he wished to live in amity with the descendants of Chingiz. Meantime Persian gold was brought into play. Rahīm Bi and other Uzbeg chiefs were won to his side, and a breach was produced by the jealousy between Bokhārā and Khiva. Then, secure from attack from his dreaded foes of Khiva, Nādir Shāh invaded India, A.H. 1152 (1739), took Delhi with fearful slaughter, and bent his steps homewards with booty valued at eighty millions sterling.
When the news of this successful raid reached Abū-l-Fayz he sent an embassy to the conqueror, who was resting on his easily won laurels at Peshawar. “I am the last off-shoot,” he wrote, “of an ancient line. I am not powerful enough to withstand a monarch so redoubtable as thou, and so I keep myself apart, offering prayers for thy welfare. If, however, thou shouldst deign to honour me by a visit, I will show thee the regard due to a guest.”[462] The fatuous prince at the same time sought to associate his neighbour of Khiva in his abasement, but his overtures were received with outspoken contempt.
Nādir Shāh saw in the submission tamely offered by Bokhārā (1740) a means of crushing his inveterate enemy, Ilbars Khān, and he accepted Abū-l-Fayz’s invitation.
He marched from Peshawar to Herāt with three hundred elephants, a tent embroidered with pearls, and the famous Peacock Throne, ravished from the Hall of Private Audience at Delhi.[463] Thence he travelled to Karki on the Oxus frontier of Bokhārā, where he was met by Rahīm Bi with presents and supplies for his locust-horde of followers. Thence he fared to Charjūy, and traversed the mighty river by a bridge which he threw across it in three days. Leaving half his army to protect the priceless baggage, he moved on to Karakūl, a fortress one day’s march from the capital. Here he was met by Abū-l-Fayz, attended by his nobles, courtiers, and clergy, bringing a present of beautiful Arab horses. The titular sovereign of Bokhārā presented himself as a suppliant, but was given a seat by Nādir Shāh. Clad in a robe of state and crowned, the imperious guest carried his complaisance so far as to address his host as “Shāh.” But further honours were in store for the obsequious Abū-l-Fayz. Nādir deigned to accept his lovely daughter as a wife, bestowing her sister, at the same time, on his nephew. He created Mohammad Rahīm Bi, to whose influence he owed his reception, Khān, and gave him command of 6000 chosen troops levied in Turkestān. Having thus brought Bokhārā to heel, Nādir Shāh turned his attention to Khiva. He sent an envoy to Ilbars Khān, demanding his instant submission. The Khivan was a man of ungovernable temper, and his reply was to put to death those who held out to him the olive branch. This breach of the usages of Islām sealed his fate. He was attacked by Nādir Shāh with an overwhelming force, and closely invested in his fortress of Khanka. After undergoing a cannonade for three days, the proud Ilbars was forced to throw himself upon the mercy of a man whose fearful butchery of the population of Delhi showed that he was insensible of the softer feelings; and against him pleaded the children of the slaughtered envoys, whose blood cried aloud for vengeance. He was put to death, and twenty-one of his principal officers shared his fate.[464] Having thus rid himself of a perpetual thorn in his side, Nādir Shāh returned to Charjūy, whence he sent back to her father the young princess whom he had lately wedded. He then returned to Khorāsān by way of Merv, and fell a victim to a conspiracy among his followers, provoked to extremities by his insane cruelty, A.H. 1160 (1747).
The news of his death led the all-powerful Mohammad Rahīm Bi to throw off the semblance of loyalty to his effete master.[465] He entered Bokhārā with a strong force, seized the person of the wretched Abū-l-Fayz, confiscated his treasure, and finally put him to death. With him virtually ended the dynasty of the Astrakhanides, which had exhibited many virtues, neutralised, however, by an absence of will-power and a bias towards the mystic side of their religion. Their age was one of profound decadence. Its architectural remains, which reflect the spirit of an era much more closely than is generally supposed, are insignificant. They are, indeed, limited to the great college known as Shīr Dar, which was built at Samarkand in 1610, and a few other public edifices which do not shine by contrast with those dating from Tīmūr’s happier days. But Bokhārā was destined to wallow in a yet deeper abasement under the uncouth Uzbegs, who supplanted the cultured sovereigns of the Astrakhan line.
CHAPTER XXVIII
The House of Mangit
The family thus raised to royal rank by the ambition of Rahīm Bi[466] belonged to the great Uzbeg tribe of Mangit, which had been brought from the north-east of Mongolia by Chingiz, and had settled on the lower reaches of the Oxus and around Karshī, a Bokhāran citadel 140 miles south-east of the capital. Their warlike spirit had placed them at the head of the Uzbeg clans; and while the Astrakhanide sovereigns retained any real power, the loyalty of the Mangits was as conspicuous as their courage. We have seen how the imbecility of the degenerate Abū-l-Fayz tempted his headstrong minister, Rahīm Bi, to throw off the mask of allegiance. The latter sealed his disloyalty by assassinating the murdered Khān’s young heir, `Abd ul-Mū´min, who had married his daughter.[467] By an irony of fate Rahīm Bi was destined, in his old age, to sink to the condition of a roi fainéant. His vezīr, a Persian slave named Dawlat Bi, usurped all the functions of royalty, and misgoverned Bokhārā in his name. On his deathbed, having no male heirs, he designated his uncle Dāniyāl Bi as his successor—the choice having been probably dictated by his vezīr, who was acquainted with Dāniyāl’s weak and overscrupulous character, and fondly hoped to retain the mastery which he had won over the degenerate Rahīm Bi. Dāniyāl was, at his nephew’s death, governor of the town of Kerminé. His modest disposition forbade him to assume the purple. He contented himself with the title of Atālik,[468] and placed Abū-l-Ghāzi Khān, the last scion of the Astrakhanides, on the throne.[469] But his son, the famous Ma´sūm, who afterwards assumed the name of Shāh Murād, was not of a nature to brook an inferior position. Under a mask of asceticism and insensibility to the promptings of ambition, which imposed on the priesthood and the mob, he cherished deep-seated schemes of conquest. He gained unbounded influence over his doting father, and persuaded him to connive at his assassination of the vezīr, Dawlat Bi, under circumstances of peculiar atrocity. Then he gathered all the threads of authority in Bokhārā into his own hands, and, when the dotard Dāniyāl Bi died, in 1770,[470] none of his brethren ventured to dispute his claims to the successorship.[471] He was at first content to govern without reigning; and Abū-l-Ghāzi, the grandson of Abū-l-Fayz, was permitted to retain the trappings of royalty. In 1784, however, Ma´sūm had rendered intrigue and overt opposition to his rule hopeless, and felt strong enough to deprive the forlorn descendant of Chingiz of his shadowy crown. From that year dates the commencement of the reigning house, although the founder eschewed the title of king and adopted that of “Dispenser of Favours.” Ma´sūm, secure at home, turned his eyes to foreign conquest. Khorāsān, the richest province of Persia, was powerless to resist his encroachments; but the road thither was blocked by Bahrām `Alī Khān, a Persian of the Kajar tribe to which the present Shāhs belong. This remarkable man had established himself in the chief strategical position of Central Asia in 1781.[472] He had built for himself a citadel out of the ruins of Old Merv, which, even in its decay, conveys the impression of overwhelming strength; and his stern rule had reduced his kinsmen, the Turkoman tribes, to abject submission.[473] In vain did he attempt to propitiate the ruthless Amīr by an embassy, and offering prayers for the repose of the soul of Dāniyāl Bi. In 1785 Ma´sūm set out for Merv at the head of 6000 Uzbeg horsemen. After lulling Bahrām `Alī into security by one of those ruses in which he was so great an adept, he suddenly appeared before Merv, and drew its defenders into an ambuscade, in which Bahrām `Alī was slain. But the royal city defied his forces, secure in the wealth poured into her lap by a system of irrigation, the work of the Sultan Sanjar of the Seljūk line. Its headworks were a mighty barrage on the Murghāb, thirty miles above Merv, which was guarded by a strong castle.[474] The governor of these defensive works quarrelled desperately with Mahammad Khān,[475] the son and successor of Bahrām Khān; the causa teterrima belli being, as is generally the case, a woman. In the torments of disappointed love he had recourse to the Amīr Ma´sūm, to whom he delivered his charge. Thus Merv’s relentless foe was enabled to strike at the root of its prosperity. He destroyed the Sultan Band, as the barrage was called, and turned the most fertile spot on the world’s surface into a desert. Famine stared the inhabitants in the face, and they had no other resource but to submit to the ruthless Amīr. He obtained possession of the coveted prize without striking a blow, and transported the bulk of its population to Bokhārā, where they have left indelible traces in the population.[476]
Ma´sūm’s thirst for conquest was not stayed by this splendid capture. He carried his raids far into Persia, laid Khorāsān waste, and swept off so many of its wretched inhabitants that the price of Persian slaves fell in the Bokhārā bazaar to a few pence.[477] His conduct towards other princes who had the misfortune to be his neighbours was equally devoid of mercy and good faith; and at his death, in 1799,[478] the people of Khiva, Kokand, and Balkh felt that Central Asia had been delivered from a scourge almost as terrible as that wielded by Chingiz Khān. Amongst his own subjects Ma´sūm left behind him a reputation of piety and virtue. “Under his reign,” writes `Abd ul-Kerīm,[479] “the prosperity of Bokhārā excited the envy of Paradise. Religion had then taken a new lease of life. The prince was occupied only in good works, in prayers and practising devotion. He had renounced the pleasures and pomps of this world; he touched neither gold nor silver, and he spent on his own needs only the proceeds of the capitation tax levied from Jews and infidels.” Historians who are not blinded by religious prejudice give us a very different estimate of his character and the influence of his reign.
Under this cruel and hypocritical bigot Bokhārā lost the last semblance of national spirit, and succumbed to a terrorism such as that which sapped the power of Spain. Ma´sūm it was who revived the office of Rā´is-i-Sharī`at, or religious censor, which had fallen into desuetude in the rest of Islām. These officials drove the people to prayer with whips, visited neglect of outward observances with severe floggings, and, on its repetition, with death. The use of wine and tobacco was forbidden under the like penalties, and thieves and prostitutes were delivered over without trial to the executioner. Spoliation and the levy of blackmail were carried by these pests to the height of a fine art, and the sanctity of the harem itself was not respected.[480] No system can be conceived which was better calculated to repress all independence of thought and action, and encourage the growth of hypocrisy and even darker vices.