The Karakhanids take Bukhara: the fall of the Samanids

In its last decades the Samanid state was torn apart by Turkish generals and rebellious governors. In 992 the Karakhanid Hasan (Harun) Bughra Khan, a grandson of Satuq, took Bukhara, but he fell ill, withdrew and died the same year, and the amir Nuh II came to depend on Sabuktigin of Ghazni and his son Mahmud. In February 999 the commanders Begtuzun and Fa’iq deposed and blinded the amir Mansur II and set up his brother Abd al-Malik II; Mahmud used this as a pretext, defeated them near Merv and took Khurasan.

The Karakhanid Nasr ibn Ali, who held Fergana from Uzgen, then marched on Bukhara. According to Vasily Bartold’s account, based on contemporary sources, the government had the preachers in the mosques call the townspeople to arms, but the people listened to their own jurists, who ruled that when the struggle was for worldly goods Muslims were not obliged to go to their deaths; Nasr announced that he came as a friend and protector of the Samanids, and the commanders Begtuzun and Yinal-tegin went to his camp of their own accord and were arrested. On Monday 23 October 999 he occupied the city unopposed and took the treasury; Abd al-Malik and the other Samanids were sent to Uzgen. The dynasty fell, Bartold wrote, amid general indifference.

One of the princes, Isma’il al-Muntasir, escaped and fought on for some five years, at times with the help of the Oghuz, until early in 1005 he was killed by the chief of an Arab tribe near Merv. In the very month of Bukhara’s fall Mahmud solemnly ascended the throne as an independent ruler, and the caliph al-Qadir granted him the investiture of Khurasan and the title Yamin al-Dawla; the Karakhanids kept Transoxiana, and the Amu Darya became the frontier between them. Modern historians see the arrival of the Karakhanids as a definitive shift from Iranian to Turkic predominance in Central Asia, although the new rulers gradually adopted the Perso-Islamic culture of the cities.