HISTORY OF GHAZNI
Ghazni's early history is obscure; it has probably existed at least since the 7th century. Early in the 11th century, under Mahmud of Ghazna, the town became the capital of the vast empire of the Ghaznavids, Afghanistan's first Muslim dynasty. The dynasty lost much of its power later in the same century, and Ghazni was sacked in 1150-51 by the Ghurids. The town was fought over by various peoples before the Mongols secured it by 1221. They ruled the area until Timur (Tamerlane), the Turkic conqueror, arrived in the 14th century, and his descendants ruled it until 1504, when the Mughals took Ghazni and Kabul. In 1747, under Ahmad Shah Durrani, Ghazni became part of the new Afghan kingdom.
The city is not mentioned by any narrator of Alexanders expedition, nor by any ancient author so as to admit of positive recognition. But it is very possibly the Gazaca which Ptolemy places among the Paropamisadae, and this may not be inconsistent with Sir H. Rawlinsons identification of it with Gazos, an Indian city spoken of by two obscure Greek poets as an impregnable place of war. The name is probably connected with the Persian and Sanskrit ganj and ganja, a treasury (whence the Greek and Latin Gaza). We seem to have positive evidence of the existence of the city before the Mahommedan times (644) in the travels of the Chinese pilgrim, Hsuan Tsang, who speaks of Ho-si-na (i.e. probably Ghazni) as one of the capitals of Tsaukuta or Arachosia, a place of great strength. In early Mahommedan times the country adjoining Ghazni was called Zdbul. When the Mahommedans first invaded that region Ghazni was a wealthy entrepot of the Indian trade. Of the extent of this trade some idea is given by Ibn Haukal, who states that at Kabul, then a mart of the same trade, there was sold yearly indigo to the value of two million dinars. The enterprise of Islam underwent several ebbs and flows over this region. The provinces on the Helmund and about Ghazni were invaded as early as the caliphate of Moaiya (662680). The arms of Yaqub b. Laith swept over Kabul and Arachosia (Al-Rukhaj) about 871, and the people of the latter country were forcibly converted. Though the Hindu dynasty of Kabul held a part of the valley of Kabul river till the time of Mahmud, it is probably to the period just mentioned that we must refer the permanent Muslim occupation of Ghazni. Indeed, the building of the fort and city is ascribed by a Muslim historian to Amr b. Laith, the brother and successor of Yakub (d. 901), though the facts already stated discredit this. In the latter part of the 9th century the family of the Samanid, sprung from Samarkand, reigned in splendour at Bokhara. Alptagin, originally a Turkish slave, and high in the service of the dynasty, about the middle of the 10th century, losing the favor of the court, wrested Ghazni from its chief (who is styled Abu Bakr Lawik, wali of Ghazni), and established himself there. His government was recognized from Bokhara, and held till his death. In 977 another Turk slave, Sabuktagin, who had married the daughter of his master Alptagin, obtained rule in Ghazni. He made himself lord of nearly all the present territory of Afghanistan and of the Punjab. In 997 Mahmud, son of Sabuktagin, succeeded to the government, and with his name Ghazni and the Ghaznevid dynasty have beome perpetually associated. Issuing forth year after year from that capital, Mahmud (q.v.) carried fully seventeen expeditions of devastation through northern India and Gujarat, as well as others to the north and west. From the borders of Kurdistan to Samarkand, from the Caspian to the Ganges, his authority was acknowledged.
The wealth brought back to Ghazni was enormous, and contemporary historians give glowing descriptions of the magnificence of the capital, as well as of the conquerors munificent support of literature. Mahmud died in 1030, and some fourteen kings of his house came after him; but though there was some revival of importance under Ibrahim (1059-1099), the empire never reached anything like the same splendour and power. It was overshadowed by the Seljuks of Persia, and by the rising rivalry of Ghor (q.v.), the hostility of which it had repeatedly provoked. Bahram Shah (11 181152) put to death Kutbuddin, one of the princes of Ghor, called king of the Jibal or Hill country, who had withdrawn to Ghazni. This princes brother, Saifuddin Sun, came to take vengeance, and drove out Bahram. But the latter recapturing the place (1149) paraded Saifuddin and his vizier ignominiously about the city, and then hanged them on the bridge. Ala-uddin of Ghor, younger brother of the two slain princes, then gathered a great host, and came against Bahram, who met him on the Helmund. The Ghori prince, after repeated victories, stormed Ghazni, and gave it over to fire and sword. The dead kings of the house of Mahmud, except the conqueror himself and two others, were torn from their graves and burnt, whilst the bodies of the princes of Ghor were solemnly disinterred and carried to the distant tombs of their ancestors. It seems certain that Ghazni never recovered the splendour that perished then (1152). Ala-uddin, who from this deed became known in history as Ja/thn-soz (Brfiiemonde), returned to Ghor, and Bahram reoccupied Ghazni; he died in 1157. In the time of his son Khusru Shah, Ghazni was taken by the Turkish tribes called Ghuzz (generally believed to have been what are now called Turkomans). The king fled to Lahore, and the dynasty ended with his son. In 1173 the Ghuzz were expelled by Ghiyasuddin sultan of Ghor (nephew of Ala-uddin Jahansoz), who made Ghazni over to his brother Muizuddin. This famous prince, whom the later historians call Mahommed Ghori, shortly afterwards (f 174a-1175) invaded India, taking Multan and Uchh. This was the first of many successive inroads on western and northern India, in one of which Lahore was wrested from Khusru Malik, the last of Mahmuds house, who died a captive in the hills of Ghor. In 1192 Prithvi Rai or Pithora (as the Moslem writers call him), the Chauhan king of Ajmere, being defeated and slain near Thanewar, the whole country from the Himalaya to Ajmere became subject to the Ghori king of Ghazni. On the death of his brother Ghiyasuddin, with whose power he had been constantly associated, and of whose conquests he had been the chief instrument, Muizuddin became sole sovereign over Ghor and Ghazni, and the latter place was then again for a brief period the seat of an empire nearly as extensive as that of Mahmud the son of Sabuktagin. Muizuddin crossed the Indus once more to put down a rebellion of the Khokhars in the Punjab, and on his way back was murdered by a band of them, or, as some say, by one of the Mulahidak or Assassins. The slave lieutenants of Muizuddin carried on the conquest of India, and as the rapidly succeeding events broke their dependence on any master, they established at Delhi that monarchy of which, after it had endured through many dynasties, and had culminated with the Mogul house of Baber, the shadow perished in 1857. The death of Muizuddin was followed by struggle and anarchy, ending for a time in the annexation of Ghazni to the empire of Khwarizm by Mahommed Shah, who conferred it on his famous son, Jelaluddin, and Ghazni became the headquarters of the latter. After Jenghiz Khan had extinguished the power of his family in Turkestan, Jelaluddin defeated the army sent against him by the Mongol at Parwan, north of Kabul. Jenghiz then advanced and drove Jelaluddin across the Indus, afterwhich he sent Ogdai his son to besiege Ghazni. Henceforward Ghazni is much less prominent in Asiatic history. It continued subject to the Mongols, sometimes to the house of Hulagu in Persia, and sometimes to that of Jagatai in Turkestan. In 1326 after a battle between Amir Hosain, the viceroy of the formei house in Khorasan, and Tarmashirin, the reigning khan 01 Jagatai, the former entered Ghazni and once more subjected it to devastation, and this time the tomb of Mahmud to desecration, Ibn Batuta (c. 1332) says the greater part of the city was in ruins, and only a small part continued to be a town. Timur seems never to have visited Ghazni, but we find him in 1401 bestowing the government of Kabul, Kandahar, and Ghazni on Pir Mahommed, the son of his son Jahangir. In the end of the century it was still in the hands of a descendant of Timur, Ulugh Beg Mirza, who was king of Kabul and Ghazni. The illustrious nephew of this prince, Baber, got peaceful possession of both cities in 1504, and has left notes on both in his own inimitable Memoirs. His account of Ghazni indicates how far it had now fallen. It is, he says, but a poor mean place, and I have always wondered how its princes, who possessed also Hindustan and Khorasan, could have chosen such a wretched country for the seat of their government, in preference to Khorasan. He commends the fruit of its gardens, which still contribute largely to the markets of Kabul. Ghazni remained in the hands of Babers descendants, reigning at Delhi and Agra, till the invasion of Nadir Shah (1738), and became after Nadirs death a part of the new kingdom of the Afghans under Ahmad Shah Durani. We know of but two modern travellers who have recorded visits to the place previous to the war of 1839. George Forster passed as a disguised traveller with a qafila in 1783. Its slender existence, he says, is now maintained by some Hindu families, who support a small traffic, and supply the wants of the few Mahommedan residents. Vigne visited it in 1836, having reached it from Multan with a caravan of Lohani merchants,travelling by the Gomal pass. The historical name of Ghazni was brought back from the dead, as it were, by the news of its capture by the British army under Sir John Keane, 23rd July 1839. The siege artillery had been left behind at Kandahar; escalade was judged impracticable; but the project of the commanding engineer, Captain George Thomson, for blowing in the Kabul gate with powder in bags, was adopted, and carried out successfully, at the cost of 182 killed and wounded. Two years and a half later the Afghan outbreak against the British occupation found Ghazni garrisoned by a Bengal regiment of sepoys, but neither repaired nor provisioned. They held out under great hardships from the 16th of December 1841 to the 6th of March 1842, when they surrendered. In the autumn of the same year General Nott, advancing from Kandahar upon Kabul, reoccupied Ghazni, destroyed the defences of the castle and part of the town, and carried away the famous gates of Somnath.
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Category: Ghaznavid Empire
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The Ghaznavid Empire (Persian: سلسله غزنویان ) was a Khorāṣānian Sunni Muslim state[1] that existed from 962 to 1187, centered in what is now Afghanistan, and ruled much of Persia, Transoxania, and the northern parts of the Indian subcontinent. It was created and ruled by a highly Persianized family of mamluk Turkic origin.
The dynasty was founded by Alp Tigin, a military general of the Ṣāmānī sultans, with the city Ghazna as its capital. After the Battle of Dandanaqan in 1039, it lost its western territories to the Seljuqs and moved its capital to Lahore, thus shifting its rule from Khorāṣān to the Panjāb.
Contents
1 Rise to power
2 Domination
2.1 Legacy
2.2 The Ghaznavid Dynasty
3 See also
4 Literature
5 References
6 External links
Ghaznavids Rise to power Rise to power
Two military families arose from the Turkic Slave-Guards of the Samanids — the Simjurids and Ghaznavids — who ultimately proved disastrous to the Samanids. The Simjurids received an appanage in the Kuhestan (Quhestan) region of southern Khorasan. Alp Tigin founded the Ghaznavid fortunes when he established himself at Ghazna (modern Ghazni, Afghanistan) in 962. He and Abu al-Hasan Simjuri, as Samanid generals, competed with each other for the governorship of Khorasan and control of the Samanid empire by placing on the throne emirs they could dominate when Abdul Malik I of Samanid died in 961. Abu al-Hasan died in 961, but when the Samanid Emir Abdul Malik I, died in 961 CE it created a succession crisis between Abdul Malik's brothers. A court party instigated by men of the scribal class—civilian ministers as contrasted with Turkic generals—rejected Alp Tigin's candidate for the Samanid throne. Mansur I was installed, and Alp Tigin prudently retired to his fief of Ghazna. The Simjurids enjoyed control of Khorasan south of the Oxus but were hard-pressed by a third great Iranian dynasty, the Buwayhids, and were unable to survive the collapse of the Samanids and the rise of the Ghaznavids.
The struggles of the Turkic slave generals for mastery of the throne with the help of shifting allegiance from the court's ministerial leaders both demonstrated and accelerated the Samanid decline. Samanid weakness attracted into Transoxania the Qarluq Turks, who had recently converted to Islam. They occupied Bukhara in 992 to establish in Transoxania the Qarakhanid, or Ilek Khanid, dynasty. Alp Tigin had been succeeded at Ghazna by Sebüktigin (died 997). Sebüktigin's son Mahmud made an agreement with the Qarakhanids whereby the Oxus was recognized as their mutual boundary. .
Ghaznavids Domination Domination
Saboktekin made himself lord of nearly all the present territory of Afghanistan and of the Punjab by conquest of Samanid and Shahi lands. In 997, Mahmud, the son of Sebük Tigin, succeeded his father upon his death, and with him Ghazni and the Ghaznavid dynasty have become perpetually associated. He completed the conquest of Samanid, Shahi lands, the Ismaili Kingdom of Multan, Sindh as well as some Buwayhid territory. Under him all accounts was the golden age and the height of the Ghaznevid Empire. Mahmud carried out seventeen expeditions through northern India establishing his control and setting up tributary states. His raids also resulted in the looting of a great deal of plunder. From the borders of Kurdistan to Samarkand, from the Caspian Sea to the Yamuna, he established his authority.
The wealth brought back from the Indian expeditions to Ghazni was enormous, and contemporary historians (e.g. Abolfazl Beyhaghi, Ferdowsi) give glowing descriptions of the magnificence of the capital, as well as of the conquerors munificent support of literature. Mahmud died in (1030), and his son Mas'ud was unable to control the conquered lands and lost the Battle of Dandanaqan in (1040). Even though there was some revival of importance under Ibrahim (1059-1099), the empire never reached anything like the same splendour and power. It was soon overshadowed by the Seljuqs of Iran.
Sultan Bahram Shah was the last Ghaznavid King ruling Ghazna, the first and main Ghaznavid capital. Ala'uddin Ghori, a Ghorid King, conquered the city of Ghazni in 1151, for the revenge of his brother's death. He razed all the city, and burned it for 7 days. Ghaznavid power in northern India continued until the conquest of Lahore in 1187.
After their loss of power, the remaining Ghaznavids stayed in Ghazni, where – over the centuries – a new tribe evolved, namely the Ghilzai tribe, first documented in the 16th century. The historical sources are quite unclear but it is assumed that it was the Nasher, the former Ghaznavid Khans, who ruled the Ghilzai Kharoti tribe for ten centuries. They became prominent again between the 16th and 17th centuries, when the Khans founded several dynasties, among them the Hotaki Dynasty, ruling Persia and the (Lodi) Moghul Dynasty in Delhi.
Ghaznavids Legacy
The Ghaznevid Empire was the first significant Islamic empire in Asia and marked a break of political control from the Abassids and Baghdad. The Ghaznavid empire grew to cover much of present-day Iran, Afghanistan, and northwest India and Pakistan, and the Ghaznavids are generally credited with launching Islam into Hindu-dominated India. In addition to the wealth accumulated through raiding Indian cities, and exacting tribute from Indian Rajas the Ghaznavids also benefited from their position as an intermediary along the trade routes between China and the Mediterranean. They were however unable to hold power for long and by 1040 the Seljuks had taken over their Persian domains and a century later the Ghurids took over their remaining sub-continental lands.
Ghaznavids The Ghaznavid Dynasty
Alptigin (963-977)
Abu Mansur Sebük Tigin Khan (977-997)
Ismail (997-998)
Yamin ud-Dawlah Mahmud (998-1030)
Jalal ud-Dawlah Mohammed (1030-1031)
Shihab ud-Dawlah Mas'ud I (1031–1041)
Jalal ud-Dawlah Mohammed (second time) (1041)
Shihab ud-Dawlah Maw'dud (1041-1050)
Mas'ud II (1050)
Baha ud-Dawlah Ali (1050)
Izz ud-Dawlah Abd ul-Rashid (1053)
Qiwam ud-Dawlah Toğrül (Tughril) (1053)
Jamal ud-Dawlah Farrukhzad (1053-1059)
Zahir ud-Dalah Ibrahim (1059-1099)
Ala ud-Dawlah Mas'ud III (1099-1115)
Kemal ud-Dawlah Shirzad (1115)
Sultan ud-Dawlah Arslan Shah (1115-11180
Yamin ud-Dawlah Bahram Shah (1118-1152)
Mu'izz ud-Dawlah Khusrau Shah (1152-1160)
Taj ud-Dawlah Khusrau Malik (1160-1187)
Nasher Khans, later Ghilzai Khans (from the 16th century)
Ghaznavids See also
Mahmud of Ghazni
History of Afghanistan
History of Iran
History of India
History of Pakistan
Islamic Empires in India
Ghaznavids Literature
C.E. Bosworth: The Ghaznavids. Edinburgh, 1963
Ghaznavids References
C.E. Bosworth, "Ghaznavids", in Encyclopaedia Iranica, Online Edition 2006, (LINK)
islamicarchitecture.org about the Ghaznavid Dynasty
M. Ismail Marcinkowski, Persian Historiography and Geography: Bertold Spuler on Major Works Produced in Iran, the Caucasus, Central Asia, India and Early Ottoman Turkey, with a foreword by Professor Clifford Edmund Bosworth, member of the British Academy, Singapore: Pustaka Nasional, 2003, ISBN 9971-77-488-7.
Ghaznavids External links External links
Columbia Encyclopedia (Sixth Edition) - Mahmud of Ghazna
Encylopaedia Britannica (Online Edition) - Mahmud
Encyclopaedia Britannica (Online Edition) - Ghaznavid Dynasty
Encyclopaedia Britannica (Online Edition) - Ghaznavids and Ghurids
Mahmud Ghaznavi's 17 invasions of India
This article incorporates text from the Encyclopĉdia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.
Categories: our article database articles incorporating text from the 1911 Encyclopĉdia Britannica | Ghaznavid Empire | 963 establishments | 1187 disestablishments | Empires and kingdoms of India | History of the Turkic people
FACTION: The Sultanate of Ghazni
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