Download PDF | (The Early and Medieval Islamic World) Robert Haug - The Eastern Frontier_ Limits of Empire in Late Antique and Early Medieval Central Asia-I. B. Tauris (2019).
309 Pages
INTRODUCTION
The Turks haven’t come to us; we have come to them
In his History of the Prophets and Kings, the chronicler Ṭabarī (839–923) reported that in 724–5 a messenger came to the Umayyad governor of Samarqand, Ḥasan b. Abī al-ʿAmarraṭah al-Kindī (r. ca. 724–9), warning of an imminent attack against the Muslims of Transoxiana by a force of 7,000 Turks. According to this anecdote presented on the authority of Ḥasan’s wife, the messenger announced that ‘these Turks have come to you’, but Ḥasan corrected him saying, ‘They haven’t come to us; rather, we have come to them, taken their country from them and enslaved them.’1 Ḥasan did not dismiss the messenger’s concerns, promising that he would still send his troops out to face the Turks.
Instead, he recognized the geopolitical realities of Transoxiana in the early eighth century, a region the Muslims had only recently and not quite definitively conquered and removed from the Turkish Khāqānate’s sphere of influence. From Ḥasan’s view, the Turks were not invading the lands of the Muslims, but the Muslims had invaded the lands of the Turks. We do not expect such an attitude from a governor overseeing a city on the frontier of the Umayyad Caliphate (r. 661–750) at a time when the Turks were a serious threat to the Muslim presence north of the River Oxus. Ḥasan’s contemporaries also found this odd and accused him of shirking his duty to fight the Turks and responding when his wife called but not when Samarqand was threatened by invasion.2 Beginning in 720, Transoxiana was under seemingly constant threat from the Türgesh Turks, a tribal confederation that seized the reins of the Western Türk Khāqānate in the early eighth century.
By the middle of the decade, the Türgesh were on the offensive in Sogdiana – the core of Umayyad Transoxiana centred on the River Zarāfshān and the ancient cities of Samarqand and Bukhara – eventually pushing the agents of the Umayyad Caliphate below the Oxus. One of the worst and most humiliating defeats had come just a year before Ḥasan received the news of the Turks descending on Samarqand at the battle remembered as the Day of Thirst (yawm al-ʿaṭash). In 724, during a campaign into the Ferghana Valley, an army under the leadership of the recently dismissed governor of Khurāsān Muslim b. Saʿīd al-Kilābī (r. 722–4) was caught by Turkish forces beyond the River Jaxartes. After making a hasty retreat under constant harassment, covering several stages in a single day and even burning their baggage to stay ahead of the pursuing Turks, Kilābī and his men were blocked at the Jaxartes by the armies of Ferghana and Chāch (Tashkent). The Muslims were forced to fight their way through to the river, resulting in high casualties.3
Frontier warfare such as this dominates the story in many of our literary sources for the history of late antique and medieval Central Asia. The eastern frontier of the Islamic world – defined for this study as the area stretching from the eastern shores of the Caspian Sea to the Hindu Kush and from the highlands of the Iranian plateau to the River Jaxartes and beyond towards the Inner Asian steppe – is described as a place for fighting against the Turks.4 The tenth-century geographers of the so-called Balkhī School are paradigmatic of this. Iṣṭakhrī (writing ca. 951) and Ibn Ḥawqal (d. 973) wrote that there is no region in Islam with a greater portion in jihad than Transoxiana because most of its borders touch the Dār al-Ḥarb or ‘Abode of War’.5 They added that the people of Transoxiana spent profusely on jihad and the defence of the frontier, comparing these expenses and the rewards that come to those of the Hajj. For Muqaddasī (ca. 945–1000) the entire region north of the River Oxus is the Dār al-Jihād or ‘Abode of Jihad’, a land dedicated to fighting.6
These geographers placed the eastern frontier at the limits of the Islamic world, imagining it as a dividing line between the Abode of Islam on one side and the Abode of War on the other, but the governor of Samarqand Ḥasan al-Kindī in the opening anecdote understood that no such clear-cut line existed, at least not in the early eighth century, nor could the world be divided so easily into two conflicting realms. Instead, Ḥasan ruled over a complex frontier, a space where the Umayyad Caliphate was still fighting to consolidate its control against local populations and imperial rivals. This book is a study of the evolution of the eastern frontier of the Iranian and Islamic world from the late antique through early medieval periods, during which empires centred in Iran and lands further west – from the Sasanians (r. 224–651) to the Abbasids (r. 750–1258) – widened the reach of their authority beyond the banks of the River Oxus. I explore the development of this region from a complex zone of overlapping and competing political, social and economic groups to a region that can be imagined by medieval geographers as a clearly delineated border between two well-defined areas. In doing so, the role of the frontier in the development of the medieval Islamic world will be examined.
At the same time, by examining the dynamics along this distant frontier, a place far from the centres of imperial power in Iraq, we may develop a better understanding of the nature of late antique and early medieval empire. Due to its physical and human geography, the eastern frontier in the late antique and medieval periods could not be so easily incorporated into the empires that surrounded it. On the one hand, regions like Sogdiana and Ṭukhāristān would always maintain their own identity and a society that relied on movement across the frontier in all directions. On the other hand, the challenge of ruling the eastern frontier was always met by rivals who could neither be eliminated nor co-opted for long, and therefore any authority in the lands between the Murghāb and Jaxartes Rivers represented a precarious balance between competing imperial and local conditions. In this book, I argue that the dynamics of the frontier, something akin to what Frederick Jackson Turner called the frontier process, was vital to all political decisions as empires advanced into Khurāsān, Ṭukhāristān and Transoxiana and as local populations responded. Such responses were not equal, opposite or reactionary.
Instead they sought to meet and maintain an equilibrium; after all a frontier represents the balancing point between a state or other territorially defined entity and its neighbours or the physical limit of its power. Such an equilibrium allowed the frontier – as a meeting of both geopolitical entities such as empires and environmental realms such as the sedentary agrarian world of the river valleys and oases as opposed to the nomadic steppe – to find a certain balance. As we explore the history of the eastern frontier, what we see is that drastic changes on one side of the frontier create a domino effect that shifts this equilibrium dramatically from one direction to the next. For example, a balance developed between two empires who extracted wealth from the oasis cities of Sogdiana through raiding without establishing political superiority, as happened between the Umayyad Caliphate and the Türk Khāqānate in the late seventh century. But once one side pushed forward, established a more permanent occupation in the region and transformed their mode of wealth extraction from raiding to taxation, as the Umayyads did in the early eighth century, the balance of the local order became disrupted. As local lords resisted the changing political and economic dynamic and rivals defended their position more aggressively, conquerors had to remake society to meet the new order, not just rule over the existing one. The narrative of these dynamics is often lost in our sources – especially those available for late antique and early medieval Central Asia. These sources, such as chronicles and works of descriptive geography, are written from the perspective of the imperial centre. This means that not only do they view the frontier primarily as an extension of the state, but also they view narratives of conquest and settlement as triumphalist, concerning the origins of the empire they are memorializing. Modern historians do much the same by projecting the ideologies, orders and infrastructures of empire out to its limits, expecting states to act coherently and cohesively throughout their borders. This book puts the dynamic of the frontier at the centre of the narrative.
Between the Oxus and the Jaxartes
H. A. R. Gibb opened his 1923 study The Arab Conquests of Central Asia with the observation that ‘the Oxus is a boundary of tradition rather than of history’.7 He noted that the famed River Oxus – Jayḥūn in Arabic and Amū Daryā in Persian – never acted as a barrier to imperial ambitions. Neither Alexander the Great (r. 356–23 BCE) nor the Arabs stopped at its banks, but pushed towards its northern twin, the River Jaxartes – Sayḥūn in Arabic and Syr Daryā in Persian – the ancient frontier of the Achaemenid Empire (r. 550–330 BCE) whose borders represent a persistent ambition for later empires of Iran. Nor was it to the Oxus that the Sasanians retreated when the Huns, Hephthalites and Turks descended on Sogdiana and Ṭukhāristān. Rather it was the River Murghāb, closer to the northern face of the Iranian plateau, where they built fortresses and reinforced cities such as Marw, Marw al-Rūd and Herat. Gibb was correct; in none of these cases did the Oxus represent a clear barrier or impediment to conquering armies or the movement of people in general, but, as Gibb suggested, it was certainly a border in the way that people not only imagined Central Asia but how they ruled it.8 The Oxus played an important role in defining the regions on either side: Khurāsān sat across from Transoxiana or Mā warā’ al-nahr in Arabic, literally ‘that which lies across the river’, and they were seen as distinct geographical realms ‘even in periods when the two regions came under the sway of one supreme ruler’.9 Even though both sides of the river shared a great deal of history and culture – Gibb highlighted the continued Iranian-ness of Sogdiana and its Transoxianan neighbours – there were differences that divided them. Similarly, the Oxus was not the only geographic barrier that defined Central Asian history. Khurāsān and its neighbours, Ṭukhāristān and Transoxiana, were divided by mountains, deserts and rivers while passes, trade routes, pilgrimage sites and river crossings tied them together. Though none of these posed true impediments to imperial expansion, they did influence the way empires took shape. The frontier moulded the Arab–Muslim conquests of Khurāsān, Ṭukhāristān and Transoxiana, the integration of these regions together into the Islamic world and their eventual unification into a Greater Khurāsān most fully realized under the Sāmānid dynasty (r. 819–999). The focus of this book is the role of the frontier as a complex geographic space, in terms of both physical and human geography, in the shaping of Khurāsān and its neighbours to the north and east – the eastern frontier of the Sasanian Empire and the early Islamic caliphate. Throughout I argue that the complexity of the eastern frontier presented a specific set of challenges and opportunities to those who sought to build and expand empires that incorporated Khurāsān, Ṭukhāristān and Transoxiana and that, in the end, instead of any one empire fully subsuming these regions, the experience of the Arab–Muslim conquests and the diffusion of an Islamic imperial identity into the region did more to consolidate a shared local identity – though not one entirely of local provenance – than incorporate the eastern frontier into the larger empire of the caliphate. This book began as a dissertation with an interest in the rise of the so-called independent eastern dynasties of the ninth and tenth centuries, most importantly the Ṭāhirids (r. 821–73) and Sāmānids. These dynasties ruled Khurāsān, Ṭukhāristān and Transoxiana as an autonomous state while acting nominally as servants of the Abbasid Caliphate. The story of these dynasties is most often told from the perspective of a declining Abbasid Empire with a diminished capacity to keep independence-minded governors in check. I found the simplistic centre– periphery dichotomy to be wanting and sought alternative approaches that could help me explore the rise of these dynasties and the related re-emergence of Persian as a language of literature and the court and the rebirth of a Persianate court culture inspired by the Sasanian shahanshahs. In doing so, I was drawn towards examining these developments through the lens of the frontier for several reasons and realized that the questions I asked could be addressed by concentrating on the frontier. Beyond the centre–periphery question that focused on the relationship between the eastern provinces, the dynasties that ruled them and the political centre in Iraq there were questions about the nature of the Abbasid Empire as a state, the theme of Persian ‘nationalism’, the intersection between local and imperial cultures and identities and the process of Islamization in Khurāsān, Ṭukhāristān and Transoxiana. Questions related to issues of integration, acculturation and identity are prominent in frontier and borderland studies. Then there is the eastern frontier itself. Khurāsān, Ṭukhāristān and Transoxiana comprise a frontier that often attracted military interests as empires and states sought to defend themselves from incursions by steppe nomads and expand their territory. Centring the frontier allows us to focus on interactions among different and competing political and social groups to find patterns that may help us understand the political, economic and cultural processes that led to the rise of the Ṭāhirids and Sāmānids. But the origins of the eastern dynasties are no longer the primary objective of this book. Instead, this book is a history of the eastern frontier itself, one that examines Khurāsān, Ṭukhāristān and Transoxiana from the rise of the Sasanians in the third century through the collapse of the Sāmānids at the end of the tenth century.10 This book seeks to better understand the path of Central Asian history in the late antique and the early medieval periods through its role as a zone of negotiation and competition – a frontier – and to better understand how the geographical context of the region shaped its history. Given that Khurāsān and its neighbours, Ṭukhāristān and Transoxiana, were long-standing frontiers between not only different states and empires but also different cultural and social spheres and even environmental settings, this book grows from the position that the frontier had a deep impact on the way the region was organized and how its political actors viewed their connections to empires. Instead of this positioning becoming a cause for autonomy from empires, it dictated the manner actors would connect to them. The experience of integration into the early Islamic caliphate, in the end, was more important for the way it knitted Khurāsān and its neighbours together and redefined the frontier – on the one hand pushing it further into Inner Asia while also charging the frontier with new religiously constructed meaning. As the empire of the Abbasids weakened, this new identity also shaped a frontier between Khurāsān and its western neighbours that would become more pronounced as competition grew within the former Abbasid oikumene. The frontier was not an open gap or fissure between civilizations. It consisted of networks, political structures and modes of political engagement that persisted across centuries and challenged imperial ambitions in reflexive relationships with imperial structures and actors. Of course, the suggestion of local agency or importance should not strike any historian as novel. This book is an attempt to provide a history of the eastern frontier that details the role of local actors and political structures in conversation with imperial actors and structures.
Frontiers and the history of the Islamic world
Islamic history has previously been examined from the perspective of the frontier, an approach that puts the agency for state and cultural developments in the hands of actors living on the edges of the state or cultural sphere. A variety of scholars have applied such an approach to various aspects of Islamic history, some more directly than others.11 Some scholars focused on frontiers to understand the larger Islamic world, such as Khalid Yahya Blankinship whose study of the fall of the Umayyad Dynasty, The End of the Jihād State, connected the end of the expansionist jihad led by the Umayyad caliphs to the collapse of the regime and the success of the Abbasid Revolution.12 In Blankinship’s analysis, the end of outwardly directed frontier warfare resulted in idle warriors redirecting their attention towards the proper organization and establishment of the centre. Linda Darling made a similar observation that the assassination of the Caliph ʿUthmān (r. 644–56) was the result of frontier interests, namely those of the army of Egypt, filtering back to the centre in Medina.13 These examples straddle a line between studies of frontiers and studies of the Arab–Muslim conquests, as does this book. Patricia Crone, while not directly addressing frontiers, argued that major political upheavals in early Islamic history were primarily concerned with renegotiating and reorganizing the dynamics of the centre rather than overthrowing, avoiding or doing away with the centre.14 For both Blankinship and Crone the greater narrative of early Islamic history was based primarily on negotiations that occurred on the frontiers of the Muslim world among the armies of the conquests. Even though we often consider frontiers the very peripheries of states, the experiences of the Arab– Muslim conquests of the seventh century rapidly created an empire that consisted largely of frontiers or at least of territory that had recently been conquered and whose relationship to the caliphate had to be negotiated at a time when territorial expansion was still moving forward at full force. Political centres such as Baṣra and Kūfa in Iraq were founded as garrison cities (amṣār) designed to house and coordinate the armies that would conquer Iran. Michael Bonner made the case for viewing the premodern Islamic world as a series of interconnected frontiers and emphasized the role of frontier warfare and jihad in the history of its political and social development.15 Taking a less direct political approach, Richard Bulliet made a convincing argument for the pre-eminent role of the frontiers in defining religious doctrine in Islam: The View from the Edge. 16 Bulliet argued that too much attention has been paid to the effect of political centres on the development of Muslim belief and that real power of change was located away from the centre among groups of believers brought together by local religious leaders. At its core, Bulliet’s argument is similar to that of Frederick Jackson Turner’s ‘frontier thesis’ of American history, which holds that the struggles between people of different backgrounds over economic resources and political power in a receding frontier zone explain the development of a unique American identity.17 In Bulliet’s work, the frontier was where groups of Arab–Muslims and non-Arab converts intermingled and competed and through this process of interaction a new and distinct Muslim identity developed. Bulliet looked east, but a similar dynamic can be seen among volunteer fighters of jihad along the Arab–Byzantine frontier of northern Syria and southeastern Anatolia. Bonner underscored the role played by such frontier fighters and the scholars who inspired (and fought alongside) them in the development of the scholarly and legalistic traditions of Sunni Islam and the strained relationship between the ulema or religious scholars and political authorities.18 Deborah Tor similarly argued that it was the caliphs’ inabilities to effectively lead jihad along the frontiers that allowed authority to transfer from the caliphs to the ulema and the leaders of bands of volunteer fighters of jihad (mutaṭawwiʿa).19 Other approaches have focused on telling the history of particular frontiers, what some have called thughūrology – from the Arabic term for frontier, see Chapter 1.20 Bonner’s work on the ʿawāṣim, the region immediately south of the Arab–Byzantine frontier, demonstrated how frontier regions matured and became integrated into imperial networks following conquest. Bonner argued that the ʿawāṣim – which modern historians considered a buffer zone between the frontier and the political centres of Syria and Iraq, an area of retreat and a final line of defence beyond the militarized frontier – was a zone of settlement, acting as a space where recently conquered territories were made part of the caliphate.21 Asa Eger added archaeology to the legalistic perspective rooted in particular textual traditions favoured by Bonner, studying the evidence of settlement and fortification along the Arab–Byzantine frontier in light of the ideological and religious meanings imbued in the frontier by literary sources.22 These studies of the Arab–Byzantine frontier describe a dynamic zone where not only is expansion possible but the integration of the territory into an imperial sphere was under constant negotiation and involved the intermingling of peoples. The inhabitants of frontier regions, especially those who fought along the frontier, have also been a focus of study. Linda Darling’s study of Ottoman origins, a field rife with examinations of ghazis or holy warriors leading raids across the frontiers of Islamdom, exposed the tension found in literature – particularly epic poems and religious catechisms – between the inhabitants of frontiers and representatives of the central Ottoman authorities. The epic celebrated individual heroism that took advantage of the boundarylessness of border society to make friends, converts, and marriages among the putative enemy, extolled the bonds of comradeship and the acquisition and generous disposal of personal wealth, and in general embodied the romantic and individualistic aspects of border warfare. The catechism, on the other hand, sought precisely to set controls on the fluidity of border society, to impose boundaries between warriors identified primarily as Muslims and their unbelieving opponents, and to interpose the state and its demands into the collection of wealth and the disposition of the spoils of campaign.23 Darling’s case study of frontier warfare in the early Ottoman period demonstrated the tension between the realities of frontier society and the ideals imposed upon it by the constraints of a centralized state. By emphasizing the tensions at play here, she also brought to light the fantasy of a state that shares a homogenous identity from centre to periphery. Similar phenomena have been examined along the frontier between Muslim and Christian Spain where Muslim mercenaries fought their coreligionists under a Catholic banner and vice versa.
The eastern frontier specifically has also been the focus of previous studies. Jürgen Paul examined local elites in eastern Iran and explored the reach of the state in Khurāsān and Transoxiana from the ninth into the thirteenth centuries and the role of intermediaries in negotiating political authority.25 Paul argued for limited state involvement in local affairs and painted a picture of a region dominated by local lords.26 Others have focused on the integration of Islamic elites into the local fabric and the development of a hybrid authority. In a recent dissertation, Mark Luce employed the eastern frontier to explore the process of Islamization, not only among the conquered populations but also among the Arabs who replaced tribal identities with urbanized Islamic identities during the Umayyad period.27 He also argued that the resulting Islamic institutions came to replace the structures of the local kings of Sogdiana and Ṭukhāristān and that these regions were incorporated into the empire of the caliphate. This book complements the interests of Luce’s dissertation. Whereas Luce’s study is interested in how the arms of empire reached into the frontier and the corresponding institutionalization processes, this study hopes to examine the allure of the frontier from the other direction and the ways in which conqueror and conquered sought a balance that created a new society. The reach of the state has also been of interest to those studying warfare along the eastern frontier. Tor has written on the use of jihad as conducted by ʿayyār bands (errant holy warriors) to legitimize the rise of the Ṣaffārid dynasty in Sīstān (r. 861–1003) and their eventual expansion across the Iranian world.28 In another study, Paul examined the role of volunteer fighters in the Sāmānid military in a similar vein and the difficulties inherent in maintaining the loyalties of their leaders.29 For the most part, these studies have focused on the relationship between centre and periphery and the tension between the local and the imperial. In contrast, this book emphasizes the centrality of the frontier region itself as its own actor and a place with its own history and traditions. While the military nature of the frontier is important – and due to the limitations of our sources much of the narrative is told from the perspectives of governors and generals – the focus on frontier warfare emphasizes the oppositional nature of the frontier – the confrontation of two groups who meet at a geopolitical divide. Throughout this book, the frontier is instead examined as a gradient that blends and transitions slowly from one side to the other and from one node of power and authority to another, forming its own unique identity along the way. The geography of the eastern frontier The geographic focus of this book is a region that was simultaneously the eastern fringe of the Islamic world and the Iranian world in the late antique and the early medieval periods. In simplest terms, the geographic focus of this book is on the grand province of Khurāsān and its neighbours to the north and east, Transoxiana and Ṭukhāristān, respectively. Under the early Islamic caliphate all three of these territories would often be administered together as a Greater Khurāsān, which could also include Sīstān (Sijistān). From antiquity through the early Islamic period, a broad frontier stretched out from the eastern coast of the Caspian Sea across Transoxiana to the high mountains called ‘the roof of the world’ of the Tiānshān, Pāmir and Hindu Kush between the Iranian world and the empires that dominated it and the nomadic steppe. This region was often contested between the two groups with the frontier zone falling under the control of nomads who conquered and settled in the region. The division of the Mashriq or ‘The East’ into distinct regions could be a point of debate and the boundaries between different regions were often contestable. For example, the geographer Muqaddasī defended his decision to use only two divisions, Khurāsān and Transoxiana, leaving Sīstān part of Khurāsān and not even suggesting the possibility of separating Ṭukhāristān in the organization of his geographical work, highlighting conflicting practices among his predecessors.30 Modern historians have also been challenged by the geographic organization of eastern Iran. Richard Frye, for example, once suggested dividing the region into an Indo-Bactrian zone centred on Ṭukhāristān and a Saka-Bukharan zone that passed from Sogdiana through Khurāsān to Sīstān, each with its own cultural identity.31 Simultaneously, each of these regions could be further subdivided into multiple zones with their own social, political, cultural and ethnolinguistic characteristics historically. Yet each region also had its own unifying and defining characteristics, as discussed below.
Khurāsān
The name Khurāsān derives from the Middle Persian Khwarāsān meaning ‘land of the rising sun’. This name first appeared with the division of the Sasanian Empire into four military-administrative divisions under the Shahanshah Khusrow I Anūshīrwān (r. 531–79).32 The boundaries of Khurāsān were not geographically fixed and could change with the shifting borders of the empire, growing and shrinking with each military success and failure, thereby leaving its extent open to debate. For consistency, I apply the term Khurāsān to those territories that had regularly fallen under Sasanian rule south of the River Oxus and west of the River Murghāb. Historically Khurāsān, as defined here, had three major urban centres – Marw in modern Turkmenistan which often served as the administrative centre of the province, Nīshāpūr in northeastern Iran which rivalled Marw as the political centre at times and Herat in northwestern Afghanistan – but there were many other smaller cities and districts in Khurāsān such as Marw al-Rūd which commanded the frontier between Khurāsān and Ṭukhāristān along the River Murghāb. The networks of urban centres and their dependent villages and agricultural lands acted as the primary unit for organizing and administering Khurāsān, but other geographical considerations further subdivided the province. Parvaneh Pourshariati suggested a division of Sasanian Khurāsān into an ‘Inner’ and ‘Outer’ Khurāsān separated by the Bālkhān, Küren Dāgh, Kopet Dāgh and Bīnālūd mountain ranges and the Khwarazm Desert which lies to the north and east of these ranges.33 These mountains divided the main urban centres of Marw in ‘Outer’ Khurāsān – which approximates classical Margiana – from Nīshāpūr in ‘Inner’ Khurāsān – which approximates classical Parthia. The emphasis of this book is ‘Outer’ Khurāsān.
Transoxiana
The name of the region both in its more familiar Latin form, Transoxiana, and its Arabic form, Mā warā’ al-nahr, – ‘that which lies beyond the river’ – is descriptive of its geography. Transoxiana is the region beyond the River Oxus. The northern and eastern limits of Transoxiana in the Islamic era ‘were where the power of Islam ceased and depended on political conditions’.34 Transoxiana did not have the same history united by empire as Sasanian Khurāsān and the divisions of the region were more pronounced. At the centre of Transoxiana was the area historically known as Sogdiana (Ṣughd in Arabic), the region between the Oxus and Jaxartes rivers along the River Zarāfshān. Dominated by the two great cities of Samarqand and Bukhara, Sogdiana was home to a unique Sogdian culture and people with their own Iranian language, best known for their role throughout late antiquity as traders along the trans-Asian network we today call the ‘Silk Road’. Because of their mercantile role, Sogdian colonies were found throughout the region beyond this central core. To the east of Sogdiana laid the region of Usrūshana, in the foothills of the Hissar Mountains, home to an autonomous prince at the time of the Arab–Muslim conquests with the Sogdian title Afshīn. North of Usrūshana, in the Chirchik and Āhangarān Valleys of the western stretches of the Tiānshān Mountains called the Chatkal, were the heavily populated provinces of Chāch or Shāsh and Īlaq. Further east laid Ferghana, a 300-km valley surrounded on the north by the Tiānshān Mountains the east by the Pāmir Mountains and the south by the Alai and Hissar Mountains. Ferghana was the gateway for Sogdian traders to China via the Tarim Basin and was later home to a Sogdian princely line with the title Ikhshīd. To the northwest of Sogdiana, at the point where the River Oxus empties into the Aral Sea was Khwarazm, another region with its own unique Iranian language and history of independent rule. Khwarazm is separated from Khurāsān by the Qara-Qum Desert and from Sogdiana by the Kyzyl-Kum Desert, giving it a sense of isolation and thereby political independence. Khwarazm’s place in either Transoxiana or Khurāsān can be debated because it spreads across both sides of the Oxus but, for our purposes, its history is more closely tied to the experiences of Transoxiana than Khurāsān and therefore belongs there.
Ṭukhāristān
Closely approximate to ancient Bactria, Ṭukhāristān can be difficult to define geographically. Some scholars limit its extent to the area between Balkh to the west and Badakhshan to the east, the River Oxus to the north and the Hindu Kush to the south.35 A more inclusive definition will be employed in this book to recognize the historical connections between the lands east of the River Murghāb, including the mountainous territories of Gūzgān (Jūzjān in Arabic) and Gharshistān (also Gharjistān) and the plains of Ṭālaqān that often acted as the frontier zone between the Sasanian Empire and its eastern neighbours.36 Ṭukhāristān was centred on the oasis of Balkh, the ‘mother of cities’ in the Arabic traditions, where many of the Sasanians’ eastern rivals made their capital. Some territory north of the upper Oxus such as Chaghāniyān that was separated from Sogdiana by mountains was also connected to Ṭukhāristān. This leaves us with a territory between the Hindu Kush to the south and east and the Hissar Mountains to the north bounded by the River Murghāb and the Qara-Qum Desert to the west. The name Ṭukhāristān has its origins in the name Tócharoi, the name given by the Greeks to the Yuèzhī a nomadic people who entered Bactria from the Tarim Basin in the second century BCE and formed the Kushan Empire in the first century CE. Its etymology is unrelated to the Tocharian language of the Tarim Basin and the Tócharoi spoke (or, at least, wrote in) an Iranian language we call Bactrian.37 Despite its Greek etymology, it was Ṭukhāristān that found its way into Arabic rather than other names of the region such as Kushānshahr or Bactria. As the long history of migration between the Tarim Basin and Ṭukhāristān implies, Ṭukhāristān played an important and strategic role due to its access not only to the Tarim Basin and thereby China, but also to the passes that crossed the Hindu Kush and connected Khurāsān and Transoxiana to Bāmiyān and Kabul and thereby India and Tibet. Therefore, Ṭukhāristān played a crucial role in linking India to China, making it the lynchpin of not only the ‘Silk Road’ trade between the two regions but also of the Buddhist pilgrimage routes that helped spread the religion to Central and East Asia. These broader connections can be noted in the role of Balkh as a commercial centre as well as pilgrimage centre for both Buddhists and Zoroastrians in the pre-Islamic period.
Even Greater Khurāsān: Sīstān, Gorgān and Ṭabaristān
Understanding that frontiers are never stable, we cannot bind ourselves to a strictly defined geographical limit at the outset of this book. Invaders – from all directions – did not follow administrative geographies after all. As we follow the development of the eastern frontier, we will also have to turn our attention to areas that neighboured Khurāsān, Ṭukhāristān and Transoxiana and shared an administrative unit with Greater Khurāsān at times but had a history distinct enough to not merit full attention here. Most importantly are Sīstān to the south of Khurāsān and Gorgān and Ṭabaristān to the west. Sīstān, also known as Sijistān, the Arabicized form of Sakāstān or the land of the Sakās or Scythians, was separated from Khurāsān to the north by the Qā’in–Birjand Mountains of Qūhistān, the mountainous region of southern Khurāsān. These mountains, along with the deserts of Kirmān, isolated Sīstān from the rest of Iran while the River Helmand connected Sīstān with the lands south of the Hindu Kush and northern India. These connections with northern India made Sīstān crucial to the economic and political history of the region. Geographically, Sīstān was a place of contrasts. On the one hand, Sīstān centred on great rivers such as the Helmand, which flowed from the Kuh-i Bābā Mountains near Kabul to the south and southwest over 1,000 km through Sīstān and Kirmān. In the Helmand and Arghandāb basin, around the city of Zaranj, rivers feeding from the Hindu Kush formed marshes and lakes including Lake Zarah which measured 160 km long and nearly 50 km wide in late antiquity. On the other hand, Sīstān was bounded by severe deserts, including the Dasht-i Mārgō or ‘Desert of Death’ between the Helmand and Khwāsh rivers with its summer winds that blew sand at 100 knots covering arable land and making settled life difficult. The frontier of Sīstān against the Zunbīl of Zābulistān and the Kābulshāhs was home to some of the most demanding frontier fighting in the early Islamic period. At the opposite end of the eastern frontier, Gorgān (Jurjān in Arabic) consisted of the plains to the southeast of the Caspian Sea and roughly corresponded to classical Hyrcania. It was a regular target of invaders from the Inner Asian steppe and was guarded since the Sasanian period by the Great Wall of Gorgān which stretched 195 km from the Alburz Mountains to the Caspian. At times Gorgān was administered from Khurāsān. It held a strategic point on the northern route from Iraq to Marw and was conquered during the Umayyad period by an army from Khurāsān. Further west was Ṭabaristān, a region consisting of the coastal plains and mountains along the southern shores of the Caspian Sea. The mountains provided protection and isolation for Ṭabaristān which resisted the Arab–Muslim conquests until the Abbasid era and was a regular source of resistance to imperial rule and challenges to the rulers of Khurāsān who, at different historical moments, attempted to claim Ṭabaristān and its revenues as part of their administrative duties. These are frontiers that will not receive a full study in their own right here, but will be reoccurring characters.
Between the steppe and the sown
Our discussion of the geography of the eastern frontier has thus far concentrated on the sedentary populations, focusing on urban centres, agricultural oases and river valleys, but this represents only one aspect of the geography of Khurāsān, Ṭukhāristān and Transoxiana. Throughout the deserts, steppes and even in the mountains – the areas we have used to define the limits of and barriers to each of these geographic zones that are not coincidentally the areas that are less conducive to sedentary agriculture – nomadic and semi-nomadic peoples inhabited the spaces in-between these urban centres and oases. The overlap and interaction between sedentary agrarians and nomadic pastoralists was one of the defining characteristics of Greater Khurāsān that marked it as a frontier zone. The important thing to note is that this was not a dichotomy between two distinct worlds and sedentary and nomadic populations lived together and overlapped with each other. As Nicola di Cosmo described our assumptions when it came to the northern frontier of imperial China, ‘The assumption is still with us, reflected in modern notions that the northern frontier has always been characterized by a set of dual oppositions – between pastoral and settled people (steppe and sown), between nomadic and Chinese states, between an urban civilization and a warlike uncivilized society.’38 To the contrary, these civilizations overlapped and intermingled in both northern China and along the eastern frontier of the Iranian and Islamic world. In many cases, as will be seen in later chapters, the nomadic populations also acted as a ruling class having conquered the region or parts of it and settled into urban populations themselves. We may even think of the armies of the early Arab–Muslim caliphate in such terms. The deserts, steppes and mountains surrounded urban centres and divided them from each other. The deserts that straddled the Oxus separated the cities along the Murghāb and Zarāfshān rivers. The deserts of Ṭālaqān and the mountains of Gūzgān and Bādhghīs separated Marw al-Rūd and Herat from Balkh. Unlike the European or American frontier experience in which the agriculturalists removed and replaced more mobile neighbours, the Central Asian (as well as the Middle Eastern) experience maintained a frontier between ‘dual economies undergoing regular tribal invasions’.39 Jos Gommans’s description of the frontier between nomads and the settled world in South Asia is appropriate to our discussion here for its illustration of such a blended environment.
This ecological frontier never served as a fixed or closed borderline. Rather, both sides witnessed flourishing mixed economies of wandering pastoralists coexisting with settled peasants. Apart from the seasonal variation, the frontier could be shifted more permanently by the common efforts of peasants to bring wasteland under the plow, often with the help of artificial irrigation. But the roaming pastoralists of the steppes, deserts and jungles of Eurasia were far from being exclusively at the receiving end of the encounter. On the contrary, there was an almost constant eagerness to enjoy – either by plunder or investment – the riches of the settled world. This led to frequent inroads by pastoral nomads, often holding the peasantry to ransom or even replacing agrarian fields with pastures.40 Implicit in Gommans’s description is an economic interdependence between nomadic and sedentary societies that required some level of interaction if not cooperation. This brings up questions regarding the nature of such interactions between the nomadic and sedentary populations. The relationship between nomadic and sedentary populations living in close proximity to each other is almost always a relationship driven by economic concerns following a pattern that Gommans referred to as ‘plunder or investment’ but may also be defined as ‘trade or raid’. According to this idea, based upon relative strengths, nomads may choose to raid their settled neighbours and take what they need when they feel they have the stronger position or choose to trade with them when they felt their neighbours had the upper hand.41 At the two extremes, nomads may conquer cities and establish themselves as a ruling military class and settled empires may advance into the steppes and deserts and by the force of irrigation bring new lands under cultivation. As will become apparent in the chapters that follow, this is not a perfect means to describe the situation in Greater Khurāsān. On the fringes of the region, in Ṭukhāristān and Transoxiana, people who entered the region as nomads often established their own states ruling over the settled populations and settled and urbanized themselves while maintaining their unique identities.42
A brief note on organization and sources
This book covers a lot of ground both geographically and chronologically and therefore a few words regarding the organization of the book and the sources employed are in order. For the most part, this book is organized chronologically. Beginning with Chapter 2 in which we examine the 425-year history of the Sasanian frontier and ending with Chapter 7 that situates the independent dynasties of the ninth and tenth centuries in the context of the frontier, each chapter progresses chronologically from the third to the eleventh century. Certain themes pertinent to the condition of the frontier at a particular historical moment will be explored in each chapter. The one exception is Chapter 1. Chapter 1 begins the book with a study of the image of the eastern frontier in the Arabic and Persian geographical literature of the ninth and tenth centuries. These works are considered geographical because they take as their primary focus the description of the world of their time. This first chapter is focused on the different types of spaces that made up the eastern frontier and how medieval authors imagined the frontier as a place. By examining these geographic works we get a picture of a frontier region made up of distinct and varied discrete spaces connected through networks of itineraries to urban nodes that acted as the primary centres of political and economic life. These texts show us a complex frontier with width and depth – not a line of the map – in which the structures of empire were evolving. This chapter also introduces several current theories found in frontier studies that are then employed throughout the rest of the book. Turning now to our sources, there are many challenges to studying the history of Khurāsān, Ṭukhāristān and Transoxiana in the late antique and early medieval periods, many of which will be discussed in later individual chapters. Across the book, we face a limited number of primary sources written in both the places and times we are studying. Outside of the relatively small caches of documents in Bactrian and Sogdian we have available, we must rely on chronicles and other literary histories that were written either far in geographic space from Khurāsān – most often in Iraq – or distant in time with the largest corpus appearing only in the ninth century and later. Sometimes these later texts include passages and echoes of older historical traditions but channelled through the editorial hand of a later compiler. As students of Sasanian and early Islamic history have become accustomed, we must read these texts across each other critically and with an awareness of the preconceptions that their authors brought to their writings. Sources written from the perspective of the imperial centre are prone to present the frontier as an open hole for the conquering or a place beyond the imperial order (and maybe even beyond the pale of civilization). This is a space where rebellion is natural and enemies hide behind every rocky defile. Any scholar knows to regard these depictions with scepticism. In many places, Chinese sources may supplement the Arabic and Persian texts that will form the core of our source base. The histories of western and eastern Asia have traditionally been separated, notable in the training of historians who may only learn the relevant languages for one of the two halves of the continent. As a result, I will rely heavily on the translations of Édouard Chavannes for engaging these Chinese sources.43 To fill the gaps left by our textual sources, material culture, most importantly numismatics but also archaeology, will play an important role in providing a firm ground from which to compare and test the more literary accounts we find in our written sources. The dates and places found on coins, for example, often give us solid sounding points from which we can check the veracity of other sources.
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