Ghaznavid Empire

• 1. Introduction

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  The Ghaznavid Empire was built on a paradox: a dynasty of Turkic slave-soldiers who became the most zealous champions of Persian culture the medieval Islamic world had ever seen. At its greatest reach, this empire stretched from the Oxus River in the north to the Indus Valley in the east, and from the Indian Ocean coast to the cities of Rey and Hamadan in the west. It lasted from 977 to 1186, more than two centuries of conquest, court poetry, and bitter internal struggle.

  The man who started it all was not a king by birth. He was a mamluk, a slave-soldier, who rose through the ranks of a crumbling Central Asian empire and captured a city that no one thought worth fighting over. From that unlikely beginning, his descendants would raid the temples of northern India, bring Ferdowsi and al-Biruni to their court, and force a confrontation that would ultimately consume them. How a dynasty of Turkish slaves became the patrons of Persian letters, and how the same internal fractures that made them powerful eventually destroyed them, is the story the following chapters will tell.

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• 2. Slave-Soldiers and Stolen Thrones

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  When Abd al-Malik I of the Samanid Empire died in 961, the succession dispute that followed cracked the dynasty open. Two Turkic slave-generals, Alp Tigin and Abu al-Hasan Simjuri, competed to place a puppet emir on the throne. A court party dominated by civilian ministers rejected Alp Tigin's bid. Mansur I was installed instead, and Alp Tigin withdrew south of the Hindu Kush, capturing the minor city of Ghazna and ruling it as a Samanid appointee rather than an independent sovereign.

  Alp Tigin died in 963, and after a series of short-lived governors, his slave Sabuktigin took control of Ghazna. Sabuktigin had himself lived the life of a mamluk, a Turkic slave-soldier, during his youth, and had married the daughter of his master Alptigin. The city had changed hands more than once before him: Alptigin had conquered it from the local Lawik rulers in 962, and after Alptigin's death, a governor named Bilgetigin ruled so harshly that the people invited the Lawik family back. It was Sabuktigin's military skill that removed Lawik a second time, exiled Bilgetigin, and secured the governorship for himself.

  Once established, Sabuktigin proved a capable administrator as well as a soldier. In Zabulistan, he found that the standard military land-grant system known as mustaghall had been converted into permanent private ownership, leaving the Turkic soldiery reluctant to fight. He reversed the change, restoring the land to mustaghall grants. In 976, he ended a conflict between two Turkic commanders at Bust and reinstated the original ruler. The Samanid emir, recognising his usefulness, rewarded Sabuktigin with the governorships of Balkh, Tukharistan, Bamiyan, Ghur, and Gharchistan after a victorious campaign in Khurasan.

  Sabuktigin's death left the empire's future uncertain. He distributed his territories among his sons: Ismail received Ghazna, another son received Bust, and the eldest, Mahmud, was given command of the army in Khorasan without a territorial inheritance. Mahmud proposed a division of power; Ismail refused. In 998, Mahmud marched on Ghazna, and Ismail was defeated and captured at the Battle of Ghazni. A dynasty of slave-soldiers had just devoured itself to produce a king.

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• 3. Mahmud's Golden Age

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  Mahmud succeeded to the governorship in 998, and from that moment Ghazni became permanently linked to his name. He wrote to the caliph declaring his loyalty, framing the fall of the Samanids as punishment for their treason rather than as conquest. In return, he received the titles Yamin al-Dawla and Amin al-Milla, and the mandate to champion Sunni Islam against the Ismaili and Shia Buyid dynasties.

  His reign from 997 to 1030 was the acknowledged height of Ghaznavid power. He extended his authority from the borders of Ray to Samarkand and from the Caspian Sea to the Yamuna River. Seventeen expeditions drove into northern India, setting up tributary states and returning with quantities of plunder that transformed Ghazni from a provincial outpost into a metropolis of learning.

  In India, the Ghaznavids were called Turushkas, meaning Turks, or Hammiras, a Persianised rendering of the Arabic word for commander. Mahmud defeated the Hindu Shahi at the Battle of Peshawar in 1001, invaded the Principality of Bhatiya in 1004-5, moved against the Emirate of Multan in 1006, and vanquished the Hindu Shahis again at the Battle of Chach in 1008-9. In 1018, he laid waste to Mathura, which a later historian writing in the 16th or 17th century called the richest city in India. According to that account, all the idols were burnt over a period of twenty days, gold and silver were smelted for booty, and the city itself was burned. That same year Mahmud also seized Kanauj, the capital of the Pratiharas, and extracted tribute from the Chandelas. In 1026, he raided the Somnath temple and took away a booty of twenty million dinars.

  The wealth flowing back to Ghazni underwrote an extraordinary cultural project. Mahmud modelled his court on the Samanid capital of Bukhara. He invited Ferdowsi and al-Biruni and attempted, without success, to persuade Avicenna to come. He brought entire libraries from Rayy and Isfahan to Ghazni and pressured the Khwarizmshah court to send its scholars as well. Contemporary historians including Abolfazl Beyhaghi and Ferdowsi recorded the magnificence of the capital. The poet Unsuri dedicated verse to Mahmud and his brothers Nasr and Yaqub. Another court poet, Manuchehri, wrote about the pleasures of wine. Hundreds of poets gathered at Mahmud's court because he preferred his fame to be carried in Persian rather than in any other language.

  Mahmud died in April 1030. He had chosen his son Mohammed as his successor, a decision that would set the dynasty's long decline in motion.

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• 4. The Brothers' War

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  Mohammed, whom Mahmud had chosen, was described by contemporaries as mild, affectionate, and soft. His brother Mas'ud, who had won provinces by his sword, demanded three of them and was refused. Mas'ud fought his brother, seized the throne, and had Mohammed blinded and imprisoned as punishment.

  Mas'ud's own reign ended at the Battle of Dandanaqan in 1040, where the Seljuks inflicted a catastrophic defeat and stripped the Ghaznavids of all their territories in Persia and Central Asia. The sources describe this moment as plunging the dynasty into a time of troubles. Mas'ud's last act was an attempt to collect his treasury from his forts and assemble a new army in India, but his own forces plundered the wealth. He then reversed himself and restored his blinded brother Mohammed to the throne. The two men exchanged places: Mohammed rose from prison to the kingship while Mas'ud was consigned to a dungeon. After a reign of ten years, Mas'ud was assassinated in 1040.

  What followed was rapid disintegration. Mas'ud's son Madood, governor of Balkh, heard of his father's death and marched on Ghazni, defeating the sons of the blind Mohammed. But the empire no longer held together. In the nine years after Dandanaqan, four more rulers claimed the throne of Ghazni. A Turkic mamluk general named Toghrul, listed tenth in the dynasty's line, usurped the throne after massacring Abd al-Rashid and eleven other Ghaznavid princes in 1052-53. The family's grip on its own succession had become as uncertain as its grip on its territories.

  Out of this chaos came a steadying figure: in 1058, Ibrahim, a son of Mas'ud and a calligrapher who reportedly wrote the Koran with his own pen, took the throne and began the slow work of reconstruction.

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• 5. Recovery and Persian Letters

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  Ibrahim ruled from 1059 to 1099, arriving at a peace agreement with the Seljuks and restoring cultural and political links with the wider Islamic world. The empire he governed was smaller than Mahmud's had been, shorn of its western lands and dependent on raids into northern India for revenue. Indian rulers such as the Paramara of Malwa and the Gahadvala of Kannauj offered stiff resistance. But the court stabilised, and the literary culture that had flourished under Mahmud continued without interruption.

  The poets Abu'l-Faraj Runi, Sanai, Uthman Mukhtari, Masud-e Saad-e Salman, and Sayyed Hasan Ghaznavi all worked under Ibrahim and his successors. In Lahore, which Mahmud had conquered and which became the regional capital for Indian territories, the Ghaznavids attracted Persian scholars from Khorasan, India, and Central Asia. Lahore produced the poet Masud Sa'd Salman, later considered among the significant Persian poets of the era. It was also in Lahore that Abu al-Hasan Hujwiri al-Ghaznawi wrote the Kashf al-mahjub, described as one of the most significant early works on Sufism.

  The historian Clifford Edmund Bosworth observed that the Ghaznavid sultans, despite their Turkic ethnicity, adopted Persian administrative and cultural practices so thoroughly that they threw off their original Turkish steppe background and became largely integrated with the Perso-Islamic tradition. The historian Abu'l-Fadl Bayhaqi wrote his Tarikh-e Beyhaqi in the latter half of the 11th century, continuing the tradition of Persian historical writing that the Samanids had initiated.

  This was not simply a matter of patronage. The poet Farrukhi traveled from his home province specifically to work at the Ghaznavid court, drawn by its reputation. Bosworth notes that even the court in Lahore under the final ruler Khusrau Malik had an array of fine poets, though none of their collections survived. Abu'l-Maali Nasr-Allah ibn Muhammad, who translated the classical text Kalila wa Demna into Persian prose, served Khusrau Malik as chief secretary. A dynasty founded by soldiers was being sustained, in its last decades, by writers.

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• 6. War Elephants and Arabian Horses

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  The Ghaznavid army drew from several distinct traditions. Its core was Turkic, supplemented by thousands of native Afghans recruited from the region south of the Hindu Kush. After the conquest of the Punjab, Hindus were brought into the ranks as well. A commander called sipahsalar-i-Hinduwan led the Indian contingent, which lived in its own quarter of Ghazna and practiced its own religion. Indian soldiers under their commander Suvendhray remained loyal to Mahmud. A Hindu commander named Tilak was even used against a Turkic rebel, according to the historian Baihaki.

  During the reign of Sultan Mahmud, a new and larger military training center was established at Bost, now known as Lashkar Gah. The area was known for its blacksmiths and weapons production. The army's administrative traditions descended from the Abbasid Caliphate, as with other dynasties that emerged from the Abbasid collapse.

  Arabian horses remained significant in the earliest Ghaznavid campaigns, particularly for fast raids into hostile territory. A record survives of six thousand Arab horses being sent against the Indian king Anandapala in 1008, and evidence of Arabian cavalry persists in Lahore under Ghaznavid governance as late as 1118.

  Perhaps the most distinctive military innovation was the use of war elephants. Because of their access to the Indus-Ganges plains, the Ghaznavids during the 11th and 12th centuries developed the first Muslim army to employ war elephants in battle. The animals wore armour plating on their fronts. When the Ghaznavids fought in Central Asia, these elephants functioned as a genuinely foreign weapon, unfamiliar to opponents who had never faced them.

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• 7. The World Burner and the Final Fall

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  Mas'ud III, who followed Ibrahim, ruled for sixteen years and built the Palace of Sultan Mas'ud III along with one of the Ghazni Minarets. Near that palace stands a minaret constructed of baked and unbaked pressed clay bricks, surrounded by a courtyard with four iwans. Excavations at the site uncovered carved marble panels featuring trefoil arches, scrollwork, and inscriptions in Persian and Arabic. A marble panel from the courtyard, now housed in the Brooklyn Museum, carries Kufic script above intricate vegetal motifs. The use of marble rather than common stucco or brick signals both wealth and deliberate artistic ambition.

  When Mas'ud III died in 1115, internal strife among his sons ended with Bahram Shah taking the throne as a Seljuk vassal, after defeating his brother Arslan at the Battle of Ghazni in 1117. Bahram Shah became the last Ghaznavid king to rule from Ghazni itself, holding the city for thirty-five years. In 1148, a Ghurid commander named Sayf al-Din Suri defeated him and took the capital. Bahram retook it the following year.

  The more devastating blow came in 1151. Ala al-Din Husayn, a Ghurid king, conquered Ghazni in revenge for his brother Kutubbuddin's death. Kutubbuddin had been the son-in-law of Bahram Shah but was publicly punished and executed for a minor offence. Ala al-Din Husayn burned the city for seven days, earning the epithet Jahansuz, meaning World Burner. The Seljuks intervened and restored Ghazni to Bahram, but the Ghurids continued to chip away at Ghaznavid territory in subsequent years. Ghazni fell definitively to the Ghurids around 1170.

  After 1163, the Ghaznavids relocated to Lahore, which had served as their regional capital for Indian territories since Mahmud's conquest. The final ruler, Khusrau Malik, held Lahore until 1186, when Muhammad of Ghor took the city. Both Khusrau Malik and his son were imprisoned and executed in Firozkoh in 1191, ending the Ghaznavid lineage entirely. The Ghaznavid conquests had, in the meantime, opened a path that the Ghurids would widen: the consolidation of Turko-Afghan power in northern India that eventually produced the Delhi Sultanate.

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