Khanate of Bukhara

Uzbek nomads from the steppe founded the Khanate of Bukhara at the start of the sixteenth century, when their leader Muhammad Shaybani seized the Timurid cities of Transoxiana, the land between the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers in today's Uzbekistan. Two dynasties descended from Genghis Khan ruled it, the Shaybanids and then the Janids, until the 1740s, when real power passed to the Manghit family, who in 1785 turned the khanate into the Emirate of Bukhara.

Shaybani was a grandson of Abu'l Khayr Khan, whose steppe empire along the Syr Darya broke up after his death in 1469. Unlike his grandfather, Shaybani wanted the rich oasis cities to the south. Between 1500 and 1503 he took Samarkand, Bukhara, Tashkent and Andijan, and in spring 1501 he beat the Timurid prince Babur at Sar-i Pul. Driven to Kabul, Babur later turned to India and founded the Mughal Empire. Shaybani went on to capture Urgench in Khwarazm in 1505 after a ten-month siege, Balkh in 1506 and Herat in 1507, sweeping away what remained of the Timurid Empire.

His Sunni zeal and his advance into Khorasan brought him into conflict with Shah Ismail I of the new Safavid Empire, who killed him near Merv in 1510. Persia took Khorasan, and Babur briefly held Samarkand again in 1512 before the Uzbeks recovered it. Khwarazm broke away for good under another branch of the family and became the Khanate of Khiva.

After Shaybani's death a council of the dynasty divided his lands among different branches, with major seats at Samarkand, Bukhara, Tashkent and Balkh, each holder controlling taxes and troops in his own territory. For much of the century the khanate had no fixed capital. Abdullah Khan II, the dominant figure of the later sixteenth century, whose reign sources date from 1557 or from the early 1580s until 1598, centralised power and made Bukhara the permanent seat. The early khans were cultured men: Shaybani wrote poetry in Turkic and Persian, and Abd al-Aziz Khan, who ruled Bukhara in the 1540s, founded a celebrated library.

In 1599 Baqi Muhammad, from a family of Astrakhan princes related by marriage to the last Shaybanid, took power and founded the Janid dynasty, also called the Ashtarkhanids. He reformed taxes, administration and the army. The period produced the poet Mashrab, writing in Chagatai and Persian, and a series of histories in Persian. After Khan Ubaydullah was assassinated in 1711, however, the state fell apart into rival principalities, and his successor Abu'l-Fayz controlled little beyond a few districts, by some accounts no more than the citadel.

The Uzbek Manghit clan rose through the post of ataliq, a chief minister. When the Persian ruler Nader Shah invaded in 1740, the ataliq Muhammad Hakim negotiated with him, and Bukhara submitted. After Nader's death in 1747 and the murder of Abu'l-Fayz, Muhammad Rahim ruled through child khans, then took the title of khan himself, and pushed Bukharan rule over Hissar, Shahrisabz, Khujand, Tashkent and other districts in the 1750s. In 1785 Shah Murad, a descendant of the first Manghit ataliq, Khudayar Bi, formally established the Manghit dynasty, which, lacking descent from Genghis Khan, used the Islamic title of emir.

Shown on our maps as the Bukara Khanate, it appears on the 1530 map, a generation after Shaybani's conquests and two decades after his death in battle against the Safavids. Its Manghit successor appears on later maps as the Emirate of Bukhara.