Medieval Persia 1040-1797 by Morgan David

Author:Morgan, David [David Morgan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781317415657
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd

Shāh Rukh’s successors

On Shāh Rukh’s death in 850/1447, as when Temür himself died, the Timurid world was plunged into political chaos. Ulugh Beg, being Shāh Rukh’s only surviving son, regarded himself as his father’s successor, but he had to fight for the inheritance throughout his short reign and managed to lay hands on only part of Shāh Rukh’s empire. He had no control over central or southern Persia, and his grip even on Khurāsān was very uncertain. In any case his reign was to be brought to a speedy and ignominious conclusion at the hands of his estranged son, ʿAbd al-Laṭīf, who revolted against him. Ulugh Beg was obliged to surrender, and was executed at his son’s instigation, on a trumped-up legal pretext. ʿAbd al-Laṭīf’s brother ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz, Ulugh Beg’s favourite son, was also done to death. Even in the Timurid world of the fifteenth century, patricide and fratricide were thought to be altogether too much, and few were surprised or displeased when ʿAbd al-Laṭīf was himself killed in the following year.

The throne now passed briefly through the hands of another of Shāh Rukh’s grandsons, and then away from that branch of the Timurid family. In 855/1451 it was seized by Abū Saʿīd, a grandson of Temür’s son Mīrānshāh. This success he had achieved with the help of the Özbegs from the north, under their leader Abūʾl-Khayr. It was those same Özbegs who at the end of the century would evict the Timurids from Transoxania (see Chapter 12), a conquest to the permanence of which the existence of the Soviet republic of Uzbekistan bears witness.

It took Abū Saʿīd several years to capture Shāh Rukh’s old capital of Harāt; he was not securely in possession of the city until 863/1459, though two years previously he had caused Shāh Rukh’s aged and distinguished widow, Gawhar Shād, to be murdered there. In 862/1458, at a singularly low point in Timurid fortunes, the capital was briefly occupied by the greatest of the Qara-Qoyunlu rulers, Jahān Shāh. Even at its greatest extent, the empire under Abū Saʿīd had shrunk again. He controlled only Transoxania and Khurāsān, together with – at the end of his reign – Māzandarān in the north and Sīstān in the south, and even this was far from remaining unchallenged. In Transoxania the most powerful political influence was a ṣūfī shaykh of Samarqand, Khwāja Aḥrār of the Naqshbandī order.

When in 872/1467 Jahān Shāh was killed in battle with the Aq-Qoyunlu ruler Uzun Ḥasan, Abū Saʿīd yielded fatally to the temptation to attempt the restoration of Timurid power in Āẕarbāyjān before Aq-Qoyunlu power could be fully established. The invasion, which had been urged on Abū Saʿīd by Khwāja Aḥrār, was a disastrous failure. In 873/1469 Abū Saʿīd was defeated and captured by Uzun Ḥasan, who handed him over to a grandson of Gawhar Shād for avenging execution. Abū Saʿīd had managed to maintain some kind of a position, necessarily through constant warfare, for eighteen years. As a result he had given a limited

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