A HISTORY OF INNER ASIA

106 A history of Inner Asia
eliminated both Qarakhanid authority and that of the latter’s suzerains,
the Qarakhitay.We have already remarked that if the Khwarazmshah
Ala al-Din Muhammad did not push all the way to Semireche and finish
off the Qarakhanids and Qarakhitay, it was probably because he was
eyeing more prestigious conquests in the west – ultimately that of Iraq,
with the promise of suzerainty over the caliph.It was the Nayman
adventurer Küchlüg, as we have seen, who put an end to Qarakhitay
domination in Semireche and western Sinkiang, and then briefly tormented
their populations before a Mongol advance detachment under
Jebe Noyon – looking in this instance more like a rescue party –
redressed the situation.By 1218 Central Asia was thus divided into two
main political spheres: Khurasan, Transoxania, and Fergana pertained
to the Khwarazmian empire, Sinkiang and Semireche had local rulers
beholden to Genghis Khan.
The Khwarazmshah perhaps wished to let his Mongol neighbor rule
the Orient, but he failed to perceive how mighty an opponent had
appeared on his eastern frontiers.This alone may explain the seemingly
inexplicable: why in 1218 he issued the improvident order – or condoned
the act of his governor claiming that spies were among the merchants
– of massacring a caravan that had arrived from the Mongol
conqueror’s domains at the border post of Otrar on the Syr Darya.An
additional, psychologically plausible trigger is mentioned by the foremost
authority on these events, the Ilkhanid historian Juvayni.Inalchuq,
the governor of Otrar and uncle of the Khwarazmshah, assumed the
name Ghayir Khan when appointed to that post.One of the Muslim
merchants detained at Otrar was his acquaintance and addressed him
as Inalchuq (“little Inal”) instead of as Ghayir Khan.The governor,
feeling insulted, placed the embassy under arrest, and sent a messenger
to the sultan campaigning in Iraq proposing the massacre.On the other
hand, the opinion of some modern scholars that both the governor and
the Khwarazmshah rightly suspected that there were spies among the
merchants is plausible as well.The two aspects are not mutually exclusive:
wounded pride of the already suspicious governor may have
affected the tenor of his report to the equally suspicious shah.
One year later Genghis Khan was poised on the Syr Darya with his
army, ready for the conquest of the Khwarazmshah’s realm.Mongol
power had by then matured into the military and organizational wonder
that in the course of the next several decades so amazed the world.Ala
al-din Muhammad, who had mustered troops numerically superior to
Genghis Khan’s, was nonetheless defeated and some months later per-