Who ruled Bukhara?

Bukhara is an oasis city in the valley of the Zarafshan River in what is now Uzbekistan, and with neighbouring Samarkand it was for centuries one of the richest cities of Transoxiana on the Silk Road. It reached its height as the capital of the Persian-speaking Samanid dynasty in the ninth and tenth centuries, and later served as the seat of the Uzbek khans and emirs until 1920. Its historic centre, with about 140 architectural monuments, is a UNESCO World Heritage site.

People lived in the Bukhara oasis long before the city itself existed; Bronze Age cultures flourished there from around the third millennium BCE. The traditional founding date of the city, on the site of the later citadel known as the Ark, is about 500 BCE. A Persian epic, the Shahnameh, tells a different story, crediting the legendary prince Siavash with building the citadel, but this is myth rather than history.

The region formed part of the Persian Empire and then passed in turn to Alexander the Great, the Seleucids, the Greco-Bactrian Kingdom and the Kushans. It was a Sogdian city, a centre of trade and of the worship of the goddess Anahita. After the fall of the Kushans it came under nomadic peoples from the steppe, and in the 560s the Turks of the First Turkic Khaganate defeated the Hephthalites nearby and made Bukhara their dependency. Before Islam the oasis was home to Buddhists, Zoroastrians, Manichaeans and Christians.

Arab armies reached Bukhara around 650 and found it ruled by local lords, the Bukhar Khudahs. The early raids could not hold the city, and according to the tenth-century historian Narshakhi the general Qutayba ibn Muslim had to take it several times before building a mosque in the citadel in 712 or 713. Firm Arab control came only after the Battle of Talas in 751, and Islam took root slowly over the following century.

In the late ninth century Bukhara was made the capital of the Samanid Empire, a Persian dynasty that claimed descent from the Sasanian general Bahram Chobin. Under the Samanids the city became an intellectual centre of the Islamic world, rival to Baghdad, famous for its libraries and for the revival of the Persian language; the poet Rudaki was raised there. The great hadith collector Imam Bukhari was born in the city.

The Turkic Karakhanids overthrew the Samanids in 999, and in 1005 Bukhara was formally absorbed into their state. Their ruler Arslan Khan built the Kalyan Minaret, which still dominates the skyline. In the early thirteenth century the city belonged to the Khwarazmian Empire. In 1220 Genghis Khan besieged it for fifteen days. According to Juvayni, the townspeople who surrendered were spared a general massacre, but the garrison was killed and most of the city burned. When Ibn Battuta passed through around 1333 he still found its mosques and colleges in ruins. Bukhara recovered slowly under the Chagatai Khanate and the Timurid Empire.

In the sixteenth century the Uzbek Shaybanid dynasty moved its capital to Bukhara, giving its name to the Khanate of Bukhara, which reached its greatest extent under Abdullah Khan II (ruled 1577 to 1598). The Uzbek rulers added many mosques and madrasas, including the Po-i-Kalyan complex. Nader Shah of Persia conquered the khanate in 1740. After his death the Manghit family took control, and in 1785 Shah Murad founded a new dynasty, after which the state was known as the Emirate of Bukhara. For centuries Bukhara and Khiva were major centres of the slave trade.

In the nineteenth century Bukhara was caught up in the rivalry between Britain and Russia. Two British officers, Charles Stoddart and Arthur Conolly, were imprisoned and beheaded there. The emirate eventually fell under the control of the Russian Empire, and the Trans-Caspian railway reached the area late in the century.

During the Russian Civil War, Red Army troops under Mikhail Frunze attacked the city. The last emir, Mohammed Alim Khan, fled on 31 August 1920, and after four days of fighting the citadel was destroyed on 2 September. A Bukharan People's Soviet Republic followed, until in 1924 the city became part of the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic. Today Bukhara is the capital of Bukhara Region, with about 305,000 people. Its population is officially mostly Uzbek, though many observers hold that Tajik speakers form the majority.