Abu'l Ghazi Bahadur

Abu'l Ghazi Bahadur (* 1603 ; † 1663 ) was a Khan of Khiva (ruled 1643–1663, abdicated) and a historian.

Family disputes, exile

His father was Arab Muhammed (r. 1602–1621), who was defeated in 1621 in a rebellion by his sons Ilbars and Habash, captured and murdered a year later. Abu'l Ghazi supported his father militarily and narrowly escaped to Samarkand .

The family disputes continued under Abu'l Ghazi's older brother Izfendiar (r. 1622–1643), who eventually played off Ilbars and Habash and ascended the throne in Khiva . They were apparently fueled by the tension between the Sarti , Turkomans and Uzbeks in the population. Izfendiar then ordered mass executions among the Uzbeks, and Abu'l Ghazi was detained in Khiva because he had apparently sided with the Uzbeks. He and his brother Sherif Muhammed rebelled against the Khan, but Izfendiar's Turkomans proved to be far outnumbered, and Urgench no longer offered a power base after the Amu Darya changed course. Therefore, the Uzbeks dispersed into neighboring countries around 1628 and Abu'l Ghazi fled first to the Kazakh Khan Yesim, then to Imam Quli Khan of Bukhara , while Sherif Muhammed soon reconciled with the Khan. In the unsuccessful attempt to return, Abu'l Ghazi was apparently captured and extradited to the Safavid Shah Safi I (r. 1629–1642).

He spent the following ten years (1630-1640) with a decent pension in exile in Isfahan or in Hamadan , where he studied Persian and Arabic history with preference. Finally he managed to escape to the areas east of the Caspian Sea, where he u. a. was stayed with the Kalmyks for a year . Six months after his return to Urgensch, Izfendiar died, so that Abu'l Ghazi was elevated to Khan by the Uzbek clans.

As Khan

First he had to eliminate the Turkoman opposition. The Turkomans supported the sons of Izfendiar and called on Nadir Muhammed of Bukhara (r. 1640 / 2-1645, deposed), who sent soldiers under his grandson Kassim. Abu'l Ghazi marched against Khiva , but could not take the city until the Bukharans fled due to the fall of Nadir Muhammad (1644/5). After that, Abu'l Ghazi pardoned the fugitive Turkoman clans, but broke his word and massacred them and others. a. at a meeting in Hazarasp. In those years the Khiva Khanate was politically insignificant, because its rulers could only muster a few hundred soldiers at a time.

In the following years Abu'l Ghazi successfully repulsed two attacks by the Kalmyks (Choschuten 1648, Torguten 1652/3), again took action against the Turkomans (1651/52) and moved against the Uzbek Khan Abd al-Aziz (r. 1645– 1678) twice as far as the vicinity of Bukhara (1653/4 and 1661). In the campaigns against Abd al-Aziz he was able to muster 15,000 men, a sign of the renewed power of his khanate. Furthermore, his sixteen-year-old son Anusha Muhammed proved himself as a soldier when the Bukharans attacked Abu'l Ghazi's troops returning from a raid and brought them into dire distress (1654/5). Eventually he made peace with Abd al-Aziz (allegedly because of religious concerns) and turned the government over to Anusha (1663).

As a historian

Abu'l Ghazi left the history book "Shajara-i terakime" about the Turko-Mongols or the Genghisids (1659) and the "Shajara-i turk" (i.e. Turkish family tree), which was only completed by his son Anusha. The Khan wrote in Chagatan and focused on the Scheibanids , as he wanted to present his family history since the time of Arabsah (c. 1378) and could not find anyone he could entrust with this task. His behavior was by no means unusual; B. his contemporary Subhan Quli Khan of Bukhara left a treatise on medicine. For his work Abu'l Ghazi used the work of Raschid ed Din and seventeen other "Jgiz-nameh", i.e. H. Mongol stories.

literature

• Henry Hoyle Howorth: History of the Mongols from the 9th to the 19th Century. Part 2: The So-Called Tartars of Russia and Central Asia. Div. 1-2. Longmans, Green & Co., London 1880 (Reprint: Burt Franklin, New York NY 1970 ( Burt Franklin Research & Source Work series 85, ZDB ID 844446-8 )).
• Svat Soucek: A History of Inner Asia. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge et al. 2000, ISBN 0-521-65169-7 .
• Aboul-Ghâzi Béhâdour Khân: Shajareh-ye Turk. = Histoire des Mogols et des Tatares. 2 volumes (1: Texts. 2: Traduction. ). Traduite et annotee par le Baron Desmaisons. Imprimerie de l'Académie Impériale des Sciences, St.-Pétersbourg 1871–1874 (reprint: Institute for the History of Arabic-Islamic Science, Frankfurt am Main 1994 ( Publications of the Institute for the History of Arabic-Islamic Science. Islamic Geography. Pp. 225-226, ZDB ID 2235060-3 )).

Remarks

1. ↑ On the use of the term cf. Howorth, History of the Mongols pp. 896f, the main source of this article. In contrast, Fischer Weltgeschichte Zentralasien, p. 194 prefers the terms Tajiks , Turkmen and Uzbeks .