Alp-Tegin in Ghazni and the rise of the Ghaznavids

Alp-Tegin had been brought from the steppe as a slave and rose in the Samanid army: under Nuh I he became head of the royal guard, under Abd al-Malik I governor of Balkh and commander-in-chief in Khurasan. When Abd al-Malik died in November 961, Alp-Tegin and the vizier Bal’ami tried to enthrone the late amir’s young son Nasr, whose reign lasted a single day: the army leaders, among them Fa’iq, raised Abd al-Malik’s brother Mansur I instead. Dismissed and isolated, Alp-Tegin withdrew with his guard to Balkh, defeated an army sent after him in April 962 and marched south, beating the rulers of Bamiyan and Kabul on the way. At Ghazni, on the road between Kabul and Kandahar, he took the citadel after a four-month siege from its local ruler, Abu Bakr Lawik, a kinsman of the Kabul Shah, and then obtained from Bukhara a patent as governor.

Alp-Tegin died in September 963. His son Abu Ishaq Ibrahim was driven out by the former rulers and won the town back only with Samanid help; after his death in 966 the Turkish garrison chose its leaders from among its own commanders — first Bilgetegin, then Böritigin — who struck coins bearing the names of the Samanid amirs. In 977, according to modern reconstructions, the townspeople, weary of Böritigin, called back the Lawiks, who came with the backing of the Hindu Shahi kings of Kabul. Sabuktigin, a slave whom Alp-Tegin had acquired and who had followed him to Ghazni, rallied the Turkish garrisons, defeated them at Charkh and was proclaimed amir — on 20 April 977, according to the 13th-century historian Juzjani.

Sabuktigin ruled Ghazni for twenty years, still styling himself a Samanid commander but in practice independent: he took Bust and Qusdar, in the 980s twice defeated the Hindu Shahi king Jayapala — opening, in al-Biruni’s phrase, the gates of India to his successor — and in 994–995 fought for the Samanid amir Nuh II in Khurasan. After his death in 997 his son Mahmud seized the succession, divided the Samanid lands with the Karakhanids in 999 and built from Ghazni an empire reaching from the Amu Darya to the Indus; the Ghaznavid dynasty ruled until 1186.