Khanate of Khiva

The Khanate of Khiva was an Uzbek state in Khorezm, the region of oases along the lower Amu Darya river, south of the Aral Sea, in what is now Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. It lasted, with interruptions, from 1511 to 1920, and its capital, Khiva, with its walled inner town, the Itchan Kala, is one of the best-preserved historic cities of Central Asia.

Khorezm was an ancient centre of civilisation, irrigated by canals from the Amu Darya, with Zoroastrian fortresses and cities. In the early thirteenth century it was the core of the Khwarazmian Empire, destroyed by Genghis Khan, whose armies broke dams and flooded the capital, Urgench. Later it was part of the Golden Horde and the Timurid Empire.

In 1511 Ilbars, a member of the Arabshahid branch of Genghis Khan's descendants, led Uzbek nomads into Khorezm, taking it from the Safavids. The khanate was ruled by members of this family, who were often rivals of the Shaybanid rulers of Bukhara. Its first capital was Urgench, but a shift in the course of the Amu Darya around the late sixteenth century left Urgench without water, and the capital moved to Khiva.

Abu al-Ghazi Bahadur Khan, who ruled from 1643 to 1663, after years of exile in Persia, restored the khanate's strength, fought the Kalmyks and Bukhara, and wrote two histories in Chagatai Turkic: the Genealogy of the Turks and the Genealogy of the Turkmens, important sources for Central Asian history.

Khiva's population included Uzbeks, Turkmen nomads, Karakalpaks and Sarts, Persian- and Turkic-speaking townspeople. Turkmen tribes raided Iran and Russian settlements, capturing people who were sold in Khiva's slave market. Thousands of Persians and hundreds of Russians were enslaved, which Russia used as a reason for intervention.

In 1740 the Persian ruler Nader Shah conquered Khiva. In the eighteenth century, real power passed to the inaq, a chief official from the Qungrat tribe, and in 1804 Eltuzar Inaq took the title of khan, founding the Qungrat dynasty, which ruled until 1920. Under Muhammad Rahim Khan I and his successors, Khiva was rebuilt with many of its monuments, such as the Tash Hauli palace, the Islam Khoja minaret, the tallest in Khiva, and the Kalta Minor minaret, a squat blue-tiled tower left unfinished in 1855.

Russia's first expedition against Khiva, in 1717, led by Prince Alexander Bekovich-Cherkassky, was destroyed by the khan's forces. A winter expedition in 1839–1840 failed in the snow. In 1873 a Russian army under General Konstantin von Kaufmann crossed the desert and took Khiva. The khan, Muhammad Rahim II, became a Russian vassal, freed the slaves and ceded the right bank of the Amu Darya. Khiva kept internal autonomy. In 1910 the vizier Islam Khoja, who built schools and a hospital, was assassinated.

After the Russian Revolution, the Turkmen leader Junaid Khan took power in Khiva in 1918. In 1920 the Red Army and local revolutionaries overthrew the khan and created the Khorezm People's Soviet Republic. In 1924 the Soviet Union divided the region between the Uzbek and Turkmen Soviet republics. The Itchan Kala of Khiva became a World Heritage Site in 1990.

Our maps show the khanate from 1530 to 1715. Its largest outline, about 990,000 square kilometres on the 1700 map, is much larger than Khorezm itself and stretches across Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan; the basemap even places Samarkand inside it, though Samarkand belonged to the rival Khanate of Bukhara. On the 1783 map the region is shown as Central Asian khanates.