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A HISTORY OF INNER ASIA

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The conquering Mongols 115<br />

Mansur, located in his madrasa; he was of the Hanafite madhhab, and died in<br />

the year 494 [1101].Then there was the library of Nizam al-Mulk al-Hasan<br />

ibn Ishaq, [again] in his madrasa; two libraries [endowed] by the Samani<br />

family; another library was in the Amidiya madrasa; [then there was] the<br />

library of Majd al-Mulk, one of the recent viziers; the queen’s library (khatuniya)<br />

located in her madrasa, and the Damiriya library in one of the dervish<br />

lodges (khangah) there.The use of these collections was so convenient that at<br />

any given moment I had at home two hundred volumes or [even] more, without<br />

having to leave a deposit, [even though] their value amounted to as many<br />

dinars.I gorged myself with these collections and benefited from them, and<br />

they made me forget [my own] people and family.The qualities of this book<br />

and of whatever else I have compiled derive from the collections I have<br />

described.As I was leaving Merv, I kept turning my loving glance back toward<br />

it, and began to hum a Bedouin’s composition: “The nights when we were<br />

together in Marw al-Shahijan”.<br />

Indeed, it seems that the depopulation of Merv may have originally<br />

been part of a plan that the Mongols had of converting the Murghab<br />

and other valleys of northern Khurasan – modern Turkmenistan – into<br />

one of their nomadic “habitats.” They were dissuaded from doing so by<br />

advisers suggesting that taxing settled populations brings more profit<br />

than replacing them with herds of livestock; a similar case occurred in<br />

northern China where the Mongols’ aforementioned Khitan adviser Yelü<br />

Ch’u-ts’ai saved the situation.If Transoxania escaped this fate,<br />

Semireche was less lucky: there, the conversion of a territory with a<br />

thriving urban and agricultural civilization into a nomads’ steppeland<br />

did take place, although this time not as the result of a deliberate plan<br />

but through the sheer suitability – in contrast to the half-desert, halfoasis<br />

tracts of Transoxania and Khurasan – of this area for the nomads’<br />

lifestyle.It was Semireche and territories farther east where for a long<br />

time the Mongols of Ulus Chaghatay chose to live, with the aforementioned<br />

result.This transformation is vividly described by several contemporary<br />

and native observers.Here is what the Syrian geographer Shihab<br />

al-Din al-Umari (d.1349) writes:<br />

A person who has travelled in the provinces of Turkestan and passed through<br />

its villages told me that only scattered traces and collapsed ruins have remained;<br />

the traveller sees from afar what appears like a village with solid buildings and<br />

green surroundings, and he looks forward to finding friendly inhabitants, but<br />

upon reaching it, he finds the buildings still standing but devoid of humans<br />

except for some nomads and herders, without any agriculture, for what is green<br />

there consists of grass as the Creator has let it grow, with steppe vegetation<br />

which nobody has sown or planted.

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